


Stuck with you (a little longer)

by The_Wolf_and_the_Moon



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:20:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 45,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28451526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wolf_and_the_Moon/pseuds/The_Wolf_and_the_Moon
Summary: It’s not one day that the Doctor and Rose Tyler are trapped on Sanctuary Base 6, situated atop the planet Krop Tor- an impossible world orbiting a terrifying black hole a long, long way from home. It’s more like five and a half weeks.Trapped together in close proximity for an extended period of time, with a group of strangers they might not trust, and stripped of every possession that marks the barriers of "Time Lord" and "human"- the Doctor and Rose's relationship begins to succumb to the push and pull of the gravitational forces between them.
Relationships: Doctor/Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 214
Kudos: 244





	1. A hasty marriage

It’s not one day that the Doctor and Rose Tyler are trapped on Sanctuary Base 6, situated atop the planet Krop Tor- an impossible world orbiting a terrifying black hole a long, long way from home. It’s more like five and a half weeks.

And it’s like Rose says, too- it’s not glamorous. It’s tough.

On that first night, after a cafeteria-tray dinner and a clumsy offer of companionship, Rose tries to lose herself in conversation with the other young(er) people on the base. There’s Toby, the archaeologist, Scooti, the trainee maintenance officer, and Dany, whose primary role seems to involve managing the Ood- a race of alien beings which Rose still suspects may not in fact enjoying being slaves. 

Toby is rather serious, and seems to stare a little, which makes her feel uncomfortable. But Scooti and Dany have a bit of a silly sense of humour, just like the Doctor, and Rose likes them, despite how they think of the Ood. As the Doctor once told her, it’s a different morality. But that doesn’t mean she can’t watch, and question, and if an opportunity arises- act.

Rose guffaws loudly at one of Dany’s particularly silly jokes, and the sound echoes around the cavernous chamber of Habitat 3 like a claxon. The back of her neck breaks into a million little prickles; looking over her shoulder, she sees the Doctor glowering at them from across the room.

He drops his gaze to his hands quickly.

Rose returns to the conversation, brushing her fringe behind her ear. That’s another tough thing, this push and pull and push between them. And now her interest is prickled, too.

Ida is sitting talking to him, and Rose begins to eavesdrop.

“We’re not built to expect visitors, obviously,” she is saying to the Doctor. “But there’s one spare bunk in Scooti’s quarters- last minute staffing cut and it was already in the flat pack. And then there’s Captain Walker’s cabin, which has always been empty. We were going to use it, but it just didn’t seem right, after the accident.”

“We’ll take Captain Walker’s room,” replies the Doctor, and she hears the subtle command in his tenor.

Ida is like a grown-up version of Scooti, Rose thinks. She’s shed away her playfulness, an upper layer of skin that needs must have moulted as she rose in rank, and looks at the Doctor like she’s half-shocked, half-delighted by his vacillation between irreverence and authority. But otherwise, they could almost be mother and daughter. The Doctor likes Ida too, Rose can tell.

“It _is_ the largest…” Ida hesitates, not so easily led. “But there’s just the one bed. It’s not strictly in line with regulations, unless-“

“Yes,” the Doctor cuts in sharply. “Rose is my wife.”

Rose stifles a gasp, but can’t help but spin around to look at him again.

And the way she finds him… Well, he’s looking back at her too, with those intense, chocolatey eyes. So beautiful, in the terrifying red glow of a dying galaxy.

She never thought a man could be beautiful, till she met him. But he is. 

As if drawn upon a string, Rose leaves Dany and Scooti and Toby and walks towards the Doctor.

“Is that right, Rose?” Ida asks, crossing her arms.

The Doctor gives her a subtle nod.

“Y-Yes,” she stutters out to Ida, then shoots him a rather deliberate look through her lashes. “He’s my husband.”

The Doctor swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing tremulously at his throat. Rose wants to lean over and bite it. She worries her lip instead.

“Well,” Ida says. “Okay then. We know you’ve lost everything- the crew will all put together to give you what clothes and miscellanea we can spare. But you _do_ need to contribute, too. We’re a working base.”

“That’s no problem,” Rose says with the surety of a life spent paying her way.

“I can help you examine those artefacts, looking into the writings. Perhaps improve the efficiency of your drilling,” adds the Doctor.

“We need people in the laundry,” Ida responds. 

“But I’m a genius,” the Doctor pouts childishly. “You’re going to waste me in the laundry, when I could-“ 

“We need people in the laundry, Doctor,” Ida repeats firmly.

“Fine,” the Doctor replies, folding his own arms, and she can tell he isn’t happy (but he still likes Ida). “Will you show us to our room? Rose needs to rest. It’s been a long day for her.”

She arches an eyebrow at him as Ida turns to lead them down the hall.

Ida brings them to a small, greyish compartment with a functional bed and a domineering study desk; a room obviously meant for the work-minded Captain of today’s Sanctuary Base, Rose snickers to herself. There’s only the shared bathroom down the hall, Ida informs them, and they may like to pull up the blind like so to expose the single submarine-style window. Rose thanks her, but the nothingness of the rocky black of Krop-Tor unnerves her and she promptly shuts the blind again as soon as Ida leaves. 

“We’ll keep you closed, I think,” she mumbles, turning around to find the Doctor fiddling with the door. The square-framed glasses have come out, too.

“No lock,” he mutters, giving it a few sporadic zaps. “And I can’t lock it with the sonic cause obviously there’s no lock to begin with.”

“Spose it’s not practical in case of an emergency to lock doors, on a base like this,” Rose speculates aloud.

“Hmm,” he purses his lips.

The Doctor is displeased. Rose is right of course, he thinks, but he’d hoped against hope anyway that he’d be able to rig something up to shut them in more securely.

When he looks back up at Rose, he gets the ominous feeling that a burning question is about to come spilling out over her lips. The Doctor begins to prepare himself mentally, using the techniques drilled into him through the Academy- slackening his facial muscles to form a neutral (nay, imperious) expression and readying his neurochemical transmitters to tamper down any ensuing biological responses her words may bring. Most likely the vasodilation of cutaneous blood vessels (blushing, Rose, he lectures to the Rose in his head; he’s always chattering away to Rose in his head) which he can damper by inhibiting his body’s release of adenylyl cyclase.

“Why’d you say we were married, Doctor?” she responds on cue.

He can’t answer for a moment (he’s busy inhibiting those adenylyl cyclase molecules, after all), and so Rose adds a cheerless, nervous, joke. “You could’ve taken all this to yourself, left me bunking with Scooti.”

“I need to keep you safe,” he finally answers, pained.

“Safe- from, like… another earthquake?”

The Doctor takes her in as she is, standing by the singular bed. Creamy skin; shining golden hair. Soft, plump lips and lupine eyes. They look brown from afar, but get up close to her and you can see slices of caramel, slices of green, slices of chestnut, slices of gold. She’s got a gloriously wide spread to her hips in those snug, snug jeans. A tantalising strip of flesh between her magenta jacket and the low-slung denim that is popular in her era. A hint of cleavage in the tease of a wide neckline. They aren’t in fashion, those curves of hers, in her time, but he’s always thought she looked like a goddess incarnate. Even before he dotingly traced every inch of her with a sculptor’s chisel.

And he reckons young Toby and Dany might think so too.

“Safe from them,” he finishes ominously.

“Doctor,” Rose chides, brow furrowing. “They’re normal people. They’ve been very kind to us.”

“Yes, they seem normal. And they have been kind. But we don’t know them, Rose. These sanctuary bases, cut off from civilisation, small groups of people left alone in high pressure situations… well, they’re notorious for…” he doesn’t want to finish the sentence and looks pleadingly at her instead. “I don’t have any power here, Rose. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” she says, eyes wide. 

He sighs. “I don’t want to frighten you. But you must be careful, Rose. You must let me keep you safe.”

“I’m don’t scare so easily, Doctor,” she says, giving him a wobbly smile.

“No. I know you don’t. All the same. You see that they don’t trust me either, yes? Laundry duty, Rose!”

The mood breaks like a wave on the shore. Rose giggles, resplendent. 

“They’re right not to trust me, of course. We just materialised out of nowhere. I’ve been sketching some ideas out in my notebook. But I need access to their mainframe, Rose, to research… to do something, anything, rather than just sitting here, useless…”

“You’re gonna try and divert the drill, aren’t you?” she says, realising.

“Yes.”

Rose remembers what he said earlier- that the TARDIS was the only thing he had left, literally the only thing. She wishes his words didn’t hurt so much. Cause he’s made it clear, hasn’t he? But even now, she so desperately wants to be _something_ for him. Something that counts on his ledger of things, like he’s the most important thing on hers. Like she could be trapped a million years from home with nothing to her name, but it’s okay because she’s still with him. And by the same token, she could live in a mansion, be rich, be famous- have everything she ever dreamed of as a little girl, but it wouldn’t mean a damn thing anymore without him.

But she’s being selfish. He’s hurting, badly; of course he is.

“Give it time,” she soothes, shaking off her own melancholy. “You know they’ll come to trust you. Just like they always do.”

And he looks at her so warmly then that Rose feels like she’s drowning, drowning, drowning in that hot pool of honey she’d been dunked in on Agriculture Colony-Six, when they’d been chasing those crazed, mutant bees on behalf of the Child King of the Agricorp Settlers. 

“Anyway,” he says, walking over to the desk chair and propping it against the wall. “You take the bed. I’ll sleep here.”

“Don’t be silly,” Rose chastises, placing a hand on her hip. “You can’t sleep in a chair.”

“Yes, I can,” he chimes, shooting her one of his toothy, charming, ever-deflective grins.

“Right then,” she sighs, sensing defeat. “I’m going to take my makeup off. Back in a mo,’ Doctor.”

When she returns, he’s staring blankly into the distance, his converse-clad feat perched on the desk chair, his long, lanky form scrunched up uncomfortably. Rose wants to walk over to him and pull his head to her chest and run her hands soothingly through his thick, unruly hair and down his sideburns. She wants to kneel at his feet and worship him. She wants to pull him into that bed with her and place her tongue on every part of his body. Kiss every last inch of his skin till he’s bloody forced to relax, damn it. 

Back in reality, Rose places two half-filled duffel bags down on the floor.

“Got the stuff the crew donated on the way back,” she starts to ramble, having long-since learnt from the best. “There’s some clothes in there for us both, and even a little bit of concealer for me, would you believe it, so I can spare you looking at my face another night without a ‘lil bit slap on, at least. And look what I nicked for you.”

The Doctor snaps out of his dark thoughts and into a bamboozling scene. Rose has returned and she’s holding up a small crate with a gloriously cheerful smile on her face. Her button of a nose is wrinkling adorably… Rose’s nose, he starts to rhyme in his head…

But now she’s walking over to where he’s sitting on the chair, and placing the crate down before kneeling at his feet. Commandingly, Rose grabs each of his legs and stretches them out to drape on it, like it’s intended to be a makeshift footrest. He resists the urge to salute; to bark out a pithy, besotted, “Yes Ma’am.” She then begins delicately unlacing his converse sneakers, pulling on the bow and threading the cord out through the top few eyelets and loosening the tongues. They are a little scruffy, he notices, looking down. A little worse for wear, much like him.

“Well, I didn’t really nick it,” she continues. “Asked one of the Ood who was working in the kitchen. I’m not sure this lot ‘d regard their permission for much, though.”

She shucks each shoe off, tugging from the heel and placing them neatly against the wall. Her hands are then reaching up to stretch out his legs again. The feel of them on his sock-clad feet sends a lightning bolt zinging up the Doctor’s spine. She even gives the soles a tiny little rub as she does so.

“What _do_ you think of the Ood, really though, Doctor?”

She’s so beautiful, without make-up, he thinks. He’s got a bloody goddess at his feet. Fortuna made flesh. What did she even mean, just then, about sparing him from looking at her bare face?

“That can’t be right, what they were saying about the Ood _wanting_ to be slaves. No one wants that, not really.”

“Mmm,” he stumbles out, with some considerable difficulty.

She’s right, of course. She’s so right, and warm, and kind, and brave, and determined to make this better for him, somehow- as if he deserves that. As if he hasn’t destroyed her life in his own terrible gravitation funnel.

Not only that, but it seems she’s also made the decision that while she’s here, apart from serving as handmaiden to the last of the Time Lords, she might as well free another race of subjugated people too. He’s not quite sure if she’s realised yet that that is what she’s working herself up to do, but he knows her- he can tell. While all he’s doing is feeling sorry for himself and trying to save his own skin.

Gods, but she’s a hell of a woman.

Rose looks up again and he reckons she must surely see the glassy-eyed, drooly-tongued stare of her starving supplicant. She’s young, his Rose, but she’s not naïve. She’s generously shared enough of her history with him to bring him to the conclusion that she’s known the carnal pleasure of taking a lover or two. And doesn’t that sting, imagining those strutting young cockerels she’s dated fumbling atop her, clumsily breaking her maidenhead. No one should ever hurt her.

He hopes he’s suitably impressed upon her by this point the utterly untrue idea that he, as a Time Lord, is above such mortal lusts and therefore his current expression can’t possibly be what she may think it looks like. He’s not human, after all. 

And right there is another thing which makes this situation dangerous for them both. A healthy human woman, sleeping for the foreseeable future, in the same room as a man who looks very human, but isn’t. Will she remember he is a Time Lord, and therefore untouchable, when he’s stripped of the most external signifier of his birthright- his TARDIS?

“There you are,” she says, coming to a stand again, her hands brushing tantalisingly over her knees and up her thighs. Walking over to the bed, she strips one of the blankets off and places it over him, tucking it around his shoulders and under his feet, then turns off the cabin light. It’s only the second time in his long life that anyone has ever tucked him in to anything, and he rather likes how… _cared for_ it makes him feel.

It’s black as night, but his superior vision- which she knows about, of course, he’s not _that_ much of a pervert, thank you- shows him that she’s stripping off her own shoes and her jacket.

Then she’s clambering into bed, and pulling the sheets up over her body, and _oh, gods,_ under them she’s wiggling. Why is she wiggling?

The thunk of denim, followed shortly by the softer (but still audible to the Doctor's sensitive hearing) thunk of a brassiere, gives the Doctor his answer.

He so badly needs to remember, now and always, that he is the black hole; he is the one who devours.

“Night then, Doctor,” she sighs into the air.

He attempts to clear his throat.

“Rose,” he growls, gravel still tearing at his oesophagus. “…Thank you.”

“Welcome,” she calls from bed, rolling onto her back.


	2. Cow-eyed maidens fair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Night then, Doctor,” she sighs into the air.
> 
> He attempts to clear his throat.
> 
> “Rose,” he growls, gravel still tearing at his oesophagus. “…Thank you.”
> 
> “Welcome,” she calls from bed, rolling onto her back.

The Doctor awakes with a jolt before Rose.

Most important things first, his eyes slide across the room to check on her. She’s safe. It’s dark still, but his eager eyes can see she’s splayed out on her back, sleeping soundly. The sheet she has been wearing has dropped in the night to expose her upper shoulders and the swell of her chest. He’s been enamoured with that particular area of her body ever since she wore that breathtaking off-the-shoulder dress their first Christmas in Cardiff. 

“Beauty,” he whispers to her slumbering form. 

He longs to cover her sweet mouth with his; to kiss her awake like the titular heroine who in some versions of the tale shares her own name. To ravish her where she lays. 

Shaking himself out of the fantasy, the Doctor comes to the second most important task of the morning: an assessment of his own internal state. Overall, he’s fine too, although his back aches from the uncomfortable chair, his telepathic senses are screaming for the TARDIS, and there’s a stirring in his loins and a tell-tale pressure in his pants. Looking down, he’s grateful his own blanket remained intact over night from where she’d so tenderly tucked him in.

Well, he can only solve one of those problems right now. Leaning back and trying to concentrate, the Doctor begins directing the appropriate neurochemicals needed to dampen the baser hormones rampaging through his body before they mount an attack on her. 

“Entering morning shift,” blares a speaker. They’re in the bedrooms too, apparently. Well, that’d make sense. 

“Your chosen transition track is Ravel’s Daybreak.” The music begins to play. 

“Oh, fuck off,” a half-awake Rose mutters, curling onto her side. 

“Language, Rose,” the Doctor chides good-humouredly. 

He’s from a culture where propriety was all important; a few well-placed chastisements at the start of their journey together in his previous life and his ever-empathetic Rose started cleaning up her own language around him. But barriers dropped, it does tend to come spilling out again. 

Secretly, he finds it rather thrilling. 

He wonders if she’d be bawdy in bed. If he could be bawdy with her. If she’d let him, if he’d let himself…

“Mmm, sorry,” she groans through a face of hair. “’S such nice music, too.”

“It was written for a ballet based on the Ancient Greek tale of Daphnis and Chloe,” the Doctor begins to explain enthusiastically, excited by her interest and keen as ever to impart knowledge (and not at all keen to find a distraction). “Daphnis is a young goatherd, and Chloe a shepherdess. Both of them are abandoned at birth, and grow up together in a pastoral idyll, getting into all manner of scrapes. You’d like them.”

“Is it romantic?” Rose sighs from her pillow. 

And it can only be those rampaging hormones from earlier recalibrating their offensive that are to blame for what he says to her next. 

“I am ill, but I do not know the nature of my illness: I feel pain, but am not wounded: I am sad, but I have lost none of my sheep. I am burning, although seated in the shade,” he began to recite, heavy-lidded and laboured. “Would that I were his pipe, that I might receive his breath! Would that I were one of his goats, that I might be tended by him!” 

By the time he finishes, Rose is sitting wide-eye and awake, propped up on her forearms in bed. Even the Doctor himself is surprised by his own boldness. 

“That is romantic,” she declares quietly. “You’re such a good storyteller, you know.” 

The Doctor ducks his chin. “It’s just a recitation.” 

“But I like your voice,” she smiles softly. “And you’ve the head to keep all that up there.” 

“Have you ever felt like that, about anyone?” he asks intently, surprising himself again. 

Rose gapes, then drops his gaze. He thinks he might see a flash of hurt across her face, but he can’t quite make sense of that.

“You gonna get changed?” she asks instead of answering him. 

Perhaps he’s pushed her too far; perhaps she thinks he’s taking advantage of the familiarity of their situation to try and gain intimate knowledge. Underserved intimate knowledge to fuel his own dirty fantasies. 

“Nah! Superior physiology,” he grins manically, falling back into that time-worn mask. “I can stretch the wear out on this suit a little while longer.” 

“You gonna let me get dressed?” Rose continues pointedly. 

And this time the Doctor really does blush; caught off guard, he has no time to inhibit those particular neurotransmitters. 

“Oh, um, of course. Sorry, sorry, I-“ 

“’S fine. Turn around?” 

He faces the wall. The most delectable rustling sounds begin to reach his ears. He tries to hum a little more of Ravel’s Daybreak inside his brain to distract himself. 

A frustrated Rose-sound breaks through. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“None of these fit.” 

He screws his eyes shut. 

“Just wear what you can find,” he croaks. “We’ll sort it tonight.” 

“Alright. You can turn around.” 

She’s dressed in a calico singlet and her own jeans. 

“It’s the pants,” Rose moans, brushing through her hair with a borrowed-comb and starting to put on some makeup using a small bedside mirror. 

“Yes,” he says, looking at her hips, “You’re a bit wider than the other women on the base, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” she quirks a black eyebrow at him through the mirror. 

“Oh- no, no, n-n-no. I mean…” 

“God, you’re such a bloke, sometimes. I mean for an alien, you’re really such a bloke.” 

“I just mean- they’re all very,” he says, making an awkward up and down gesture with his hands. “While you’re more… curvy- womanly. I mean, they’re fine. You- you’re beautiful.” 

“Oh,” Rose says, a funny expression settling upon her face- pleasant surprise, suspicion, a little embarrassment. “I think that actually was a compliment.”

“Course it was,” he says, trying for nonchalance. 

“Come on, you mug,” she grins, whacking him lightly on the shoulder. “Let’s see what’s going in the way of breakfast today. Dunno bout you, but I wouldn’t mind a lovely cup of protein three.” 

They giggle at each other over another cafeteria meal, the Doctor watching Rose with a proud little smile on his face as she starts another of her chatty little interrogations with the Ood serving them. He wonders if she knows what her plan is, yet. He admires her shoulders. 

And when they’ve finished, she takes their trays back to the kitchen instead of leaving them for the Ood to collect like all the other humans do. 

“What?” she asks, hand on her hip. “It’s not always fun being the dinner lady, not that you’d know.” 

But left alone together in the laundry room after breakfast, the Doctor’s good mood evaporates. Instead, he just feels empty. 

Rose picks his mood up almost immediately. She decides to take point, beginning with a thorough examination of their surroundings. It’s a small, industrial-style laundry. To the right of the room are large hampers full of unwashed clothes and bedsheets. To the left is a row of what looks like three silver washing machines and three dryers. The dryers are off but full; Ida obviously wasn’t lying about the base needing help in the laundry. 

To the front of the room is a big, walk-in linen cupboard where they were told fresh items were to be stored for distribution. Part of the laundry job by design involves pick-up and delivery to each crew member’s room, but with one crew member down they’ve just been coping themselves. The Doctor and Rose will need to do pick-up and delivery; when they were told that, the Doctor agreed so long as they wouldn’t be separated for that part of the job. 

“Well, clothes washing first, what d’you say?” Rose asks him with forced cheerfulness. “Do we still sort into whites, colours and darks in the future, d’you think?” 

The Doctor shrugs helplessly at her, and Rose thinks he may be there in body, but his mind is obviously barely hanging on, if at all. He’s about to float off ten feet above them, or he already has- and he’s breaking up into a million tiny pieces to be sucked into that void like the beautiful galaxy they watched consumed last night. Or perhaps he’s dropped a thousand feet below, searching for the TARDIS, wherever she may be. 

Rose’s single heart aches for him. 

But all she can think to give him right now is this. Pretty soon she gets the clothes sorted into three big piles on the floor.

Peering at the washing machines, it seems the doors are simple enough to open, and inside she stuffs as many clothes as she can from each respective pile. 

She cries in triumph upon finding a compartment for the washing powder, but as to actually starting the washing cycle- well, the ultramodern interface defeats her. 

“How d’you turn them on, d’you think?” Rose says to the Doctor. 

He studies it for a few seconds, still in a trance, before locating the right touch-screen combination. The first washing machine starts with a familiar rumble. 

“Show me,” she murmurs, watching carefully as he starts the other two, trying to memorise the combination so she can do it on her own next time. “Alright, while that’s going- sheets.”

Rose opens the first dryer and dumps them out on top ready to fold. 

She picks up the first one. 

“Can you help me?” she asks him, gesturing to the far end of the sheet. 

“Sure,” he says, dutifully if absent. 

Rose walks the ends together and their fingers touch. 

A spring of electricity jolts up her arm at the unexpected contact. The Doctor’s eyes snap down to where they were briefly joined, alert and finally present again. On the next pass, Rose deliberately rubs the pads of their fingertips together. All is quiet between them; all is charged. 

After they’ve finished the first load, Rose gestures for him to get started unloading the next and takes the pile of folded sheets to the linen cupboard, placing them in the large compartment labelled “bedsheets- single.” The “bedsheets-double” compartment is much smaller and there’s a layer of dust on top. Rose guesses that must mean there are no other couples on the base. 

Not that she and the Doctor are a couple. 

He’d hurt her earlier, when he’d asked what he asked. She was mostly certain he knew how she felt about him, after that conversation they’d had on that street corner near Deffry Vale High School. So when he asked if she’d ever been in love- it felt like a dismissal. Did her love for him not even count as anything, in his books? He may not return her feelings, but that didn’t mean they were any less real, dammit. Her feelings may be stupid, and small, but how she feels about him feels like the most important thing she’s ever felt. And those feelings are hers, and they won’t just go away. 

She’d never want them to, not for anything. 

When she comes back, the Doctor, the most wonderful man she’s ever known, the love of her life, is attempting to fold a t-shirt and failing completely.

“No,” she can’t help but laugh. “Like this.” 

But to his credit, he watches attentively and soon she has him. 

“Haven’t you ever folded shirts before?” she titters, then pauses. “What, really?”

“Not as such.” 

“Nor done the washing, I take it?”

He sniffs. “It’s a silly system, anyway. How can they even tell their clothes apart, mixing them all up like this?”

“Well, their names are written on the label, like-so,” Rose pantomimes. “You’d know that if you had to get dressed in a stranger’s shirt this morning like me. And then each of them has a shelf in the linen cupboard where we sort their clean clothes ‘fore bringing them to their rooms. Reckon that’s a lot less silly than a bunch of scientists and engineers wasting their time doing their own laundry separately.”

“Hmm,” he grumbles. 

“’Spose it is a bit of a waste for you, though,” she realises. “Never thought I’d be putting all those years in the shop to use teaching you something, of all people. Still, they’ll put you on something more important soon, Doctor.” 

“Then I’ll have to leave you alone, though,” he says darkly, and Rose knows he’s thinking of what he said to her last night about these bases being dangerous. 

“Don’t be silly,” she soothes. “This place is tiny, and there’s nowhere else to go- we won’t ever be far apart. Bet you’ll even be able to hear me still, working away back here with those bat ears of yours. In the meantime, I know the TARDIS has that automatic thingy- which is lovely, by the way, even if Mum thinks it’ll ruin my clothes- but tell me, you’ve never even done this back home?” 

“It’s always been… taken care of.” 

“What, did you have servants like the Ood back home doing this for you, or something?” Rose asks, suddenly uncertain. 

“We are- were- the oldest civilisation in the universe. We’d long since outgrown the need for the people of our lower classes to do our physical labour. No, the processes were just… automated, like on the TARDIS. Obviously- why would we have that technology on our ships, but not in our homes?” 

“’Spose that makes sense. Well…” she says, thinking. “But what about in this time period? The human race is pretty advanced by now, too, right?” 

“How d’you mean?”

“Not-not compared to your people, of course. But I’m saying, apart from on a base like this, do they still need, you know- laundresses, shop girls, dinner ladies? Waitresses? People like me, Doctor.” 

“Oh- well, I imagine in some places,” he says awkwardly. “Perhaps not the central planets. I mean, but then apparently they’ve all got an Ood nowadays… hmm, that’s worth considering, actually-” 

“Doctor,” she said. “You really won’t leave me, will you? Alone?”

“Course I won’t.”

“Really though, Doctor.” 

“Rose, of course not. I just said, didn’t I? I’ve said that to you many times.”

Yes, Rose thinks to herself, you’ve said it many times and left me anyway. 

How can she impress on him how important it is that he doesn’t leave her?

“I really don’t know how I’d… what I’d do to survive, you know. I don’t have any skills in my own time, let alone this one. It-it’s a bit scary, yeah?” she explains openly, letting him see the fear on her face.

“Oh, Rose,” he answers compassionately, rushing forward to grab her two hands in his; it helps. “You’re brilliant. And I think you’ll find me just as much out of my element as you in this time period.”

“Nah, but see, with that brain of yours, you can find anything to do. But what about me? Can you teach me… how to be, like, your assistant, like Sarah Jane said? Someone who can be useful to you?” 

“Rose. You are so much more than the use you are to anyone, let alone me. And you might think I’m… but without the TARDIS, I think you’ll soon find out how unimpressive a man I really am.”

“That’s not true.” 

“Isn’t it? Look at how you’re already taking over this for me…” 

“Teaching you how to fold clothes, Doctor, s’hardly an important skill.” 

“I’ve never had that kind of a life. A linear life, a domestic one. I’ll be quite useless to you, sticking to you like a duckling, having you take care of me. It’s you who will want to leave me.”

“Never,” she says, squeezing his hands hard. “Never. Do you understand me?” 

“Hmm,” he says, noncommittal. 

“And if I’m more than my usefulness, then so are you.” 

He grins wryly. “Touché.” 

Rose searches for something, anything to knock him out of his melancholy mood. She settles on something he seemed excited about earlier that morning. 

“Will you tell me more of the story?” she asks. “About Daphnis and Chloe.”

“Ah yes, I forget. My other skill- Rose Tyler’s personal bard.” 

But there’s no malice in it. 

“I can trade you,” she wheedles jokingly, tilting her head. “A little more education on the art of the laundress, perhaps?” 

“Hmm… useful, but we’ve just established we’re more than our use-value, haven’t we? What else you got?” 

“How about… a proper foot massage, this time?” she leans in conspiratorially. “I know you enjoyed that little one, last night, yeah? Like putty in my hands, you were.” 

“Ooh, well now, that is a more interesting proposition.” 

“You be my bard; I’ll be your foot masseuse.” 

“Alright, you’ve sufficiently convinced,” he says, eyes crinkling. “What story from Daphnis and Chloe would Rose Tyler like to hear next? I know! While she’s no Fortuna, Chloe is quite the beautiful young maiden of Ancient Greece. She has many other suitors, apart from Daphnis. The first of them was Dorcon.”

“Dorcon?” Rose raises an eyebrow.

“What’s in a name?” the Doctor entreats. “Wouldn’t a Rose by any other smell as sweet? Though I’m sure you’ve been hearing that one from blokes all your life.”

“Not many blokes off the estate quoting Shakespeare at me, Doctor.”

“More’s the pity,” he drips heatedly. 

Rose blushes, turning her face away bashfully under the guise of folding another shirt. 

“Like our heroes, Dorcon is a herdsman,” he continues as if uninterrupted, weaving his tale while they work. “He’s a real smooth operator, though, not like Daphnis. Big, dumb, square-jawed pretty-boy. You might be familiar.” 

“Mmm hmm,” Rose rolls her eyes. 

“He starts by giving her gifts- fresh cheese, a garland of flowers, fruit, you name it. But Chloe is very young and untutored in the ways of love. All she thinks is ‘Blimey, he’s a nice mate, isn’t he? These would make great gifts for Daphnis, who I think is rather swell.’” 

Rose giggles as the Doctor plays at a high, girlish voice, to rather comic effect. He really is a great storyteller. She could listen to him all day. 

The first loads of washing are soon successfully transferred to their respective dryers. 

“So Dorcon starts to cotton on to what she’s doing with his gifts, and decides to have a little jab at Daphnis,” he exultates, then adopts a low, jock-ish voice that is just as entertaining as his first impression. “‘I challenge you to a debate,’ Dorcon-the-dumb declares.” 

And then the Doctor’s tone becomes rather earnest. “’Very well, I’m a wonderful debater,’ says our hero. ‘Molto bene,’ says Dorcon, ‘because the topic is which of us is more handsome, the judge is Chloe, and the prize is a kiss from her own lips.’” 

Rose gasps dramatically, playing along. He’s enjoying it too, she thinks. He loves a good story; and being the centre of attention. Like a big, strutting peacock, he is, showing her all his feathers. 

“So Dorcon starts, and he’s going on about how he’s much taller, and fairer, and richer than Daphnis, who rumour has it is an orphan who was abandoned as a baby and found being suckled by a goat. And Daphnis doesn’t even have a beard, to boot.” 

“As if she’s gonna be impressed by all that,” Rose smiles.

The Doctor smiles back. “Now our hero admits that he is short, and brown, and poor, and beardless, and even that he was an orphan found by a goat- but so was Chloe, don’t ya know, and look how beautiful she turned out. Chloe of course declares him the winner at this point, though really given she’s already rather mad for him, any excuse would do. And so this part of the story serves as a lesson to the young men of your species across time- it’s not all about you showing off!” 

“Could some Time Lord’s benefit from that lesson, too?” 

“Rose Tyler,” he gasps in mock-offence. “Don’t know what you mean.” 

“Silly me. Daphnis gets his kiss from Chloe, then?” 

“Oh yes. An artless, simple kiss from our young maiden. Suddenly as if he was hitherto blind, he notices she’s rather pretty, with her fair hair, her heifer-eyes, her goats’ milk skin. He’s never felt anything like it before and doesn’t quite understand what it means – but make no mistake, his heart is set aflame from that point on.”

“So that’s how he falls in love with her. But how did Chloe fall in love with him?” 

“Ah, well. That’s another story for another day.” 

“Doctor!” 

“Alright, alright. Tonight then. After certain promises are kept.” 

Rose laughs, light as a spring meadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave kudos and reviews if you'd like more of this story!


	3. Some thoughts on nudity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So that’s how he falls in love with her. But how did Chloe fall in love with him?”
> 
> “Ah, well. That’s another story for another day.”
> 
> “Doctor!”
> 
> “Alright, alright. Tonight then. After certain promises are kept.”
> 
> Rose laughs, light as a spring meadow.

By the end of their first official day living on Sanctuary Base 6, Rose is certain of three things. One, that working in that small windowless room all day reminds her of being stuck in the back of Henrick’s sorting out stock. Two, that she might go mad without the Doctor there working with her. Three, that the Doctor might go mad if he does. 

She’s so thankful now, too, that he did insist they room together. Returning to their own private space at the very end of the day is a godsend. Anytime spent not working, which so far seems to be just a break for lunch and dinner, is to be spent ingratiating themselves with the crew, the Doctor instructs. Which is fine, it’s fine, and it’s right, but she’s still really glad they’ll always have this space alone together in their own cabin. Well, for as long as they are on the base, at least. 

The thought does occur that the Doctor, an intensely private man, might not find sharing a bedroom with her so much as a godsend but rather something he has to suffer through out of a sense of duty to keeping her safe. She hopes that isn’t the case. 

That night after dinner with the crew they shower separately and ready themselves for bed; the Doctor first, and then Rose. He returns to their cabin stripped down to just his blue dress shirt, pinstriped brown pants and socks, and she finds another singlet and a pair of draw-string pyjama shorts in her duffel bag of donations to change into.

When Rose finishes her shower, she finds that in her absence he’s been going through his own duffel bag to identify a few pairs of pants that he thinks will fit her with a bit of jiggery-pokery. Tomorrow, he says, they’ll try and find some cotton and thread in the laundry room to stitch them up tighter. Her heart melts at the sight of him sitting there crossed legged on the floor, all pale-skin and freckles and slimmer-still without his usual layers, and looking so hopeful that he’s done something to make her happy. After a long, trying day he remembered the silly little promise he made to her. 

“Alright, you,” she commands with a no-nonsense smile. “Time for your reward. Jump up on the bed.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows shoot up comically. 

“Promised you a foot rub, remember?”

She expects him to protest a bit, and he does seem a tad awkward sitting on the edge of the bed. But he’s also very eager, like a puppy pushing himself into her hands to be patted. 

He sighs a little softly as she begins to knead his feet through his socks, kneeling on the floor before him. The way he reacts to her hands on them, even over the material, makes her think he hasn’t been shown much physical affection in his long, long life. 

“That’s really nice, Rose. Thank you.”

“Can I take off your socks?” she asks through her eyelashes. 

He nods, swallowing. A tip of tongue taps his top row of teeth. 

Rose stops herself from staring at his mouth with some difficulty, and returns to the task at hand. She rolls his socks off gently and places them on top of his shoes. He has large, manly feet, with tufts of thick brown hair covering the tops and toes and neatly trimmed nails. His big toes are particularly hairy. 

She presses down firmly on the ball of his left foot. 

“Oh, Rose,” he groans, tipping his head back and setting her body aflame. 

“Like that, do ya?” she pokes her own tongue out, unable to resist a bit of a flirt. 

“Too much running,” he chuckles. “They don’t half get sore.”

“Poor Doctor. You should get them rubbed more regularly.”

“If only.”

“When was the last time you had this done?” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever had this done, Rose.”

“Really? No automated machine back home?”

“No automated machine. And while in the ancient times, every Time Lord had a beautiful human handmaiden to rub his feet in exchange for tales, by my era the tradition lay sadly dormant.” 

She chuckles, turning the idea of him calling her beautiful again back and forth in her mind. Her heart wants to ask him if he really means it, wants so desperately to know- but her head reckons there wouldn’t be a surer way to send him scampering. 

“Well, you just sit there and enjoy me starting the tradition back up then, Mr Time Lord,” she says instead. 

“Don’t tempt me, Rose. That feels so good.”

“I wouldn’t mind. You’ve got nice feet. How’s that pressure?” 

“Lovely, ta. I really don’t deserve you.” 

“Yes, you do,” she says with surety, wishing she could impress on him how much he does deserve the world, the universe, and everything in it. 

Metaphorically, of course. She’s not suggesting he become some sort of power-mad dictator. One of the strangest, most wonderful things about him is that he sees so much and never wants to own it. Just visit. 

And now he can’t do any of it. She wonders how she might get at how he’s feeling about that from an angle that doesn’t immediately throw his defences up. 

“Besides,” she continues. “Don’t know how I’d cope without you to chat to, today. Felt like working out the back of Henrick’s again counting stock, whiling my day away. At least they had music playing on the speaker; here they just seem to use those two tracks to signal the different work shifts. Don’t see any books or tellies either. Don’t know how this lot stand it, just work and sleep and repeat. Is it driving you mad, yet?” 

But it doesn’t work. 

“Like I said, these sanctuary bases can be pressure cookers,” he says darkly. “I’ve heard more than a few stories over the years… Though I expect they probably do have some eBooks lying around on their computers, if they’d let me at one.”

The drawbridge is up; the moat is full of piranhas. 

She switches tactics. 

“Speaking of entertainment, Doctor?”

“Ah yes, my big brain the eBook. Where were we with your story, then?” he asks knowingly, as if he does remember but is wants to hear it from her lips anyway. 

“You were gonna tell me how Chloe fell in love with Daphnis,” she obliges. 

“Right you are, Rose Tyler. So. Sometime before Dorcon and Daphnis have that fated debate, there’s a very exciting incident,” the Doctor begins, his canter smooth and melodious. “Now, young Daphnis and Chloe have been wandering all over hill and dale for some time at the point, tending for their flocks. Singing, having a laugh, helping each other out with the job. It’s hard, lonely work without a mate, you know.”

Roses eyes flick up to his; he gives her a subtle but meaningful waggle of his eyebrows. Cheeky bastard.

“But then, some of their animals start to go missing, and the villagers hear a strange howling during the night. There must be a wolf on the prowl,” he proclaims dramatically. 

“Oh, dear,” Rose says, running her fingers down his arch and up to rub his heel and Achilles tendon. 

“What are the villagers to do? Their primary food sources- ohhh, that’s nice there, Rose, rub a little harder- are surely in danger. Well, they get together and build a series of concentric trenches across the pastures, covering them with branches and earth to disguise them- a wolf trap.”

“Poor Mr Wolf,” Rose comments, leaning her head against his knees and shifting her bottom around on the floor so she can pay some attention to his toes. 

The Doctor begins to reach down to stroke her blonde hair absentmindedly. 

“Well, our clever wolf perceives the snare and continues to roam free,” he continues. “But Daphnis is an unfortunate victim. One night, he’s chasing after a goat, and falls into one of these pits. Chloe, never being far apart from Daphnis, sees what happens and runs to rescue him.”

“She’s rescuing him? That’s a bit of alright for Ancient Greece.”

He twirls one of her golden locks around his index finger. 

“Told you you’d like them. Now, they inspect every inch of Daphnis’ body together, and luckily, he is unhurt, but he is absolutely covered from head to toe in mud. He can’t go home like that! So they resolve to go to the Grotto of the Nymphs to wash him.” 

“What’s a “Grotto of Nymphs”?”

“A grotto is a cave with a running water source, and nymphs are female deities who are said to live in such natural places. Nymphs are a motif in a lot of Ancient Greek romances; helping the heroes, causing metamorphoses, symbolising sexual maturity,” the Doctor pauses, and looks down at Rose, as if suddenly remembering who he’s talking to. “This may get a little bawdy here, mind.”

“I’ll survive,” Rose says dryly, turning her cheek against his knee so she can watch his expression as he tells this part of the story. She figures it might be good.

“Daphnis takes off his tunic and hands it to Chloe before stepping into the spring,” the Doctor continues in sotto voce. “And Chloe, seeing him naked for the first time- seeing any man naked for the first time- is struck by his beauty.” 

Captivated by the turn the story has taken, enamoured by the sensual shapes his lips throw as they move, drawn by the dark warmth in his eyes, Rose begins to wonder if she might have overestimated her coping skills. Her hands still on his feet. 

“He’s brown, and hairy, and tanned all over. Unable to resist, but not knowing why, she steps into the water with him and offers to wash his back and shoulders. His skin is soft and yielding beneath her hand, and she’s so surprised that she more than once secretly touches herself to see whether her own skin is as delicate. And from that moment on, Chloe has but one thought, one desire- to see Daphnis in the bath again.” 

“That is bawdy,” Rose grins, feeling the heat in her cheeks. 

“Yes,” he grins back, as if they are sharing a great secret. 

Rose remembers undressing the Doctor in her flat after he regenerated, the only time when she’d seem him in less than he is now. She remembers stripping him of his belt, his jeans, his heavy leather jacket… those silly jumpers in the assortment of moody colours that he always used to love. She remembers trying not to look at his pale, naked body slumped out on the bed as she quickly pulled those pyjama pants over his nobly knees and narrow hips under the sheet. Buttoning the shirt up over him, watching his chest softly rising and falling- the only way to tell he was still clinging on to life. 

She remembers the other types of nudity he showed her, too. Staring a Dalek down with a gun in his hands; turning to her on a busy street and telling her his planet was gone. Trapped in a basement in Cardiff, about to die by her side and so happy he wasn’t dying alone (did he worry about that often?). Dancing around the TARDIS console to Glen Miller. Grabbing her hand in the snow and asking her to come with him again. 

“That makes sense, though. ‘Bout that being how she felt in love with him,” she adds at his quizzical expression. 

“Rose Tyler!” he teases, face transformed in glee. “Didn’t expect you to be so concerned with looks. Though perhaps I should have been.”

“It’s not just about his looks!” she bristles. “They were having fun together, helping each other with their work, you said so.”

“Weeelll I dunno if that is clear in the text. Perhaps she’s just as shallow as Dorcon, who, by the way, has not given up on our maiden fair.”

“Also, it’s a metaphor, obviously. For emotional intimacy.” 

“Interesting theory,” he replies, interest piqued. “Explain yourself.” 

“Being naked around someone is more than just physical, Doctor. That’d be too obvious, just taking it literally. Weren’t the Ancient Greek’s supposed to be clever?”

“Right you are. I suppose I was just… not thinking.”

“But what were you saying about Dorcon?” 

“Ah, another night.” 

“Doctor…” Rose whines.

“Come on,” he declares, lifting her up by the hands. “To bed with you.”

“But I want to know what happens.” 

The Doctor retires to the chair again, propping his long legs up on her makeshift footstool and pulling the blanket over his lanky body. “You can’t gobble up all the story in one go, Rose! What’ll we talk about tomorrow?” 

“Like you don’t have any other stories in that head of yours.” 

“Perhaps. Go to sleep.” 

“Fine,” Rose pouts, reaching for the light before crawling under her own covers. “Spoilsport.” 

“I’m a mean, mean Time Lord.” 

“That you are.” 

“Good theory, though. Very astute.”

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. Goodnight, Rose Tyler.” 

“Goodnight, Doctor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave kudos and comments if you are enjoying this story and would like to read more!


	4. Cupid and Pan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor retires to the chair again, propping his long legs up on her makeshift footstool and pulling the blanket over his lanky body. “You can’t gobble up all the story in one go, Rose! What’ll we talk about tomorrow?”
> 
> “Like you don’t have any other stories in that head of yours.”
> 
> “Perhaps. Go to sleep.”
> 
> “Fine,” Rose pouts, reaching for the light before crawling under her own covers. “Spoilsport.”
> 
> “I’m a mean, mean Time Lord.”
> 
> “That you are.”
> 
> “Good theory, though. Very astute.”
> 
> “Yeah?”
> 
> “Yeah. Goodnight, Rose Tyler.”
> 
> “Goodnight, Doctor.”

The tale of _Daphnis and Chloe_ (as told by the Doctor, who may or may not be taking some liberties) goes on as time passes. The Doctor has long known he is a born storyteller (despite earlier attempts at modesty) and takes some measure of pleasure among the monotony and dread of Sanctuary Base 6 in stretching out his story for Rose while they work.

Foot rubs are also regularly exchanged, an unexpected intimacy bestowed in their cabin of a night which the Doctor hopes Rose doesn’t think he’s taking advantage of. Because her hands on his bare feet feel so, so good. And he gets to receive more of that tenderness, that closeness, that affection from her that he has so very much craved for so very long without crossing the line into a demonstrably sexual relationship.

There’s nothing un-platonic about the woman of his dreams kneeling at his feet, giving him physical pleasure in their shared bedroom, or so he can tell the chorus panel of Time Lords in his mind judging him from on high, or Rose herself if she ever strikes up the nerve to call him on it.

Another stolen pleasure is watching her sleep. More than once he’d woken before her, or she’d fallen asleep before him, and he’d sat there on his stupid, uncomfortable chair and looked at her and inhaled her hot, feminine scent and fantasised about kissing her awake, pushing his prick into her till she woke with a gasp of welcoming surprise… Wallowing in his lust, in other words, greedy and shamed and wanting.

Apart from those three pleasures, his life has narrowed to long, repetitive days spent working in the laundry room. It’s monkey work, beneath the dignity of a Time Lord. An utter waste of his great intellect. The crew still don’t trust him enough to let him at their computers, a fact which he is becoming increasingly frustrated about.

When he says this to Rose, she flinches a little, though he doesn’t know why. But overall, she hasn’t lost her spark yet for which he is very grateful, as she keeps him buoyed in turn- just barely bobbing, liable to be knocked over by the slightest storm, but ever so slightly above water, at least. Because with every new day he feels as if he is being carried on a great current further away from the TARDIS. Further away from the man he thought he was.

One time, his tie gets stuck in one of the washing machines as he leans bodily in to try and improve it. Rose rushes to help untangle him, saving his skin as per usual. The tie is shredded, and the washing machine is unimproved.

The Doctor pockets the tattered remains, anyway. It’s one of his favourites, all swirly and blue.

When they catch up with the backlog of washing, home delivery starts. The Doctor watches over Rose like a hawk, especially when the crew are working in their cabins at the same time. Toby, sitting at his desk with his shards of pottery, gets a particularly harsh glare from the Doctor after he leans in a little too close to Rose as she bends over to change his sheets.

“What was that about?” Rose hisses to him over her shoulder as they walk out, her hips swaying dangerously.

“Don’t go into his cabin on your own,” he instructs, summoning all the pompous majesty of his long-dead species. 

“You don’t want me going into any of their cabin’s alone.”

“Especially his. I don’t like the way he looks at you,” the Doctor says, then transforms his expression completely into a frenetic grin. “You can go in to Scooti’s, or Ida’s, if you like. So long as they’re alone, and I’m within shouting distance.”

Rose rolls her eyes. “God, you’re suspicious.”

“You don’t like Toby either,” the Doctor leans in conspiratorially, bumping her shoulder. “I know you. I can tell.”

“Yeah, ‘spose,” Rose says honestly, dropping the pretence. “Maybe that’s not fair- he hasn’t really done anything.”

“What are your instincts telling you?”

She wrinkles her nose, eyes racing. “There’s just something… wrong. I dunno, he just comes across a bit creepy, I guess.”

“Mine too. You tell me, if he ever causes you problems, yes?”

“But...”

“Rose, I mean it. If he so much as steps a toe near the line, I want you to tell me.”

“I will,” she says, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“For what?”

“Looking out for me…” Rose shrugs uncertainly. “Not leaving me to deal with this alone, I guess.”

The Doctor frowns, concerned by the possible implications of that explanation. She’s been behaving quite strange, really. Half-clinging to him, needing reassurance; half-distant and rigidly self-reliant. Not at all her usual self. 

And he’s not at all sure he can put it down to the stress of their current situation.

She’d behaved just as oddly in that parallel world recently. Taking off by herself, so much more brazenly and dismissively than she usually did. Stonily silent when he’d tried to have a laugh with her. He’d been half-mad with fear the whole time they were there that she’d leave him to stay with her parallel family, and when he admitted this to her, she’d merely answered that of course she’d never leave her own Mum behind. But then she’d flipped to icy ire when he so much as spoke to another person.

And when Mickey had left her, she’d gone absolutely catatonic.

He tosses the problem around in his head, unable to identify a reason, nor a solution. Before he knows it, it’s the end of their first week on the base. 

And Friday nights are arbitrarily demarcated as social nights, apparently. Acting Captain Zachery Cross Flane makes home-brewed liquor, and allows it’s use once per week, so long as no meteor storms are scheduled, and one crew member stays sober just in case. This time, John Jefferson is the designated driver, and he’s complaining bitterly. The Doctor and Rose are invited to partake.

The Doctor sips politely, carefully watching his alcohol consumption as well as Rose’s. He’s eager to appear as if he is indeed one of them by joining in their apparent cultural ritual of getting absolutely smashed once a week, while in reality maintaining his own rigid control; a task which is easy despite the strength of the liquor with his superior physiology. But Rose gets very, very tipsy very quickly, and begins to play with his knee under the table.

They are called the mysterious couple and teased mercilessly by much of the crew who are already deep into their cups, and the Doctor uses it as an excuse to wrap his arm around Rose’s waist in kind. It’d be suspicious if he didn’t, right? 

She larks and jests and trifles with them all, but her hand is on his leg and his arm is around her waist for what feels like hours upon heady, heady hours.

Rose is flushed and glowing from the alcohol, and her flesh is so warm, and he can slip his fingers under the hem of her shirt and feel her downy, soft skin, and her hand is sliding higher up his thigh… For a short period of time, the Doctor pretends their relationship is real.

She’s his wife and he’s her husband. She’s human and so is he. Doctor Tyler and Rose perhaps, instead of the Doctor and Rose Tyler. Just one word slightly rearranged in the sentence, and instead of going back to their cabin to jam himself into that uncomfortable chair he’s going to take her back to their bed and unwrap her curves and bury himself in that tender heat between her legs, that tender heart he knows she has. Make her sigh, make her scream, leave his own scent on her and in her and mark her as his, damn the universe to know.

She’s his wife and he’s her husband, and so it doesn’t matter that he’s lost their means of transportation. They’ll stay here for now, then hitch a lift back with the crew, and find a new ship. Travel that way. Or buy a house, and settle down. Get a job, live a life, beget a brood of offspring who look a little like her and a little like him… die happy in each other’s arms, same as the rest of the universe.

“You look beautiful,” he whispers into her ear, and she turns to him with such an undisguised look of shock and joy and passion, and then her eyes drop to his lips… and then to the crew, and the table.

He looks at the crew. Looks at her bowed head. Picks up his drink. Tries to analyse the exact chemical compounds within the liquor; tries to analyse whatever the hell possessed him to say that to her with such a tone of- well, lasciviousness. 

She’s brushing her hair behind her ear and fidgeting and stealing glances at him for the remainder of the night, or at least until she begins to flag, practically draping herself over his shoulder in soporific malaise. The Doctor makes their excuses, suggesting that it

may be time for him to take Rose to bed; to his horror, the crew hoots and hollers after them down the hall.

Flushing himself now, hoping she’s too far gone to apprehend, he helps her stumble down the corridor and pours her into her bed.

“Thank you,” she slurs up at him, holding her arms out; a wordless plea for a goodnight hug.

How can he but give in? Wrapping his arms around her and squeezing tight, he tries to memorise the press of her breasts against his chest and the tickle of her hair against his cheek and her squeak of joy and her radiator-heat.

But being himself, he also can’t help but murmur a hint of reproach.

“I’m glad you had fun, and you deserve a break. But maybe not so much next time, hmm? You’re very drunk.”

“Ohhhh,” she drawls. “I am not drunk.”

“Oh yes you are,” he tuts, moving back to sit on the bed beside her, feet firmly planted on the ground. “You were meant to be keeping safe.”

“But you were there watching me the whole time!” 

“Rose. Please remember, I don’t have any power here-“

“Doctor, please stop ruining our happy night and tell me a bedtime story?”

He scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Ruining her night. And now she wants a bedtime story.”

“Yes, please.”

“I’m running out of clean parts,” he whinges.

“All that before was clean?”

“And you’ve not even given me my footrub.”

Rose looks up at him from her pillow so wantonly that when she opens her mouth, he’s sure she’s about to suggest something absolutely filthy. He cuts her off and jumps headlong into the nearest part of the story that comes to mind.

Unfortunately, it’s quite compromising too.

“Fine! You just-just… lay there and listen and try to fall asleep. One day, an old man who lives in the village finds a youth stealing food from his garden. He chases after him, yelling something about thieving kids these days and telling him off good and proper. But when the old man catches him, the thief turns to him and says ‘I am not a child, though I may seem to be: I am older than Kronos, more ancient than time itself. I knew you in the bloom of your first youth, when you were in love with Amaryllis.’”

He chances a glance at Rose. She’s still lying on her back, head pillowed, eyes big and blinking, raptured and angelic.

“’But now Daphnis and Chloe are in my care, says the thief, ‘And after I bring them together each morning. I come here to bathe in this spring. Thus, as your garden is watered by my bath, by all rights your produce is mine to share. Think yourself happy that you are only seeing me in your old age this once.’ The thief comes forward, and the old man sees that he has wings on his shoulders, and a bow and arrow.”

“He’s Cupid!” Rose exclaims clumsily. 

“Close!” chuckles the Doctor. “Good guess. He’s actually Pan, a similar god. Some say Pan is meant more to represent carnal lust, whereas Cupid represents love. In fact, in some depictions they are fighting; in others, Cupid rides on the back of Pan.”

Rose smirks a little at that, as he hoped she would.

“You may be interested to know that Daphnis and Chloe didn’t know who Pan was either! After the old man heard this, he went to tell them, believing he was doing them a kindness by letting them know they’d been matched together by Pan. But being very young, they don’t quite understand what that means. They ask the old man, and of course being a proper sort of fellow, he can only describe it in euphemisms: as a feeling of pain, of sleeplessness, of heat. Thus confused, Daphnis and Chloe take Pan’s blessing as an affliction.”

“Quite a lot of this story relies on a distinct lack of sex education in Ancient Greece,” Rose comments, gloriously unfiltered in her inebriation. “Or pornography.”

The Doctor blushes.

“That how it actually was?”

And it turns out they’re both a bit unfiltered tonight. Perhaps he’s a little more drunk than he thought.

“In some societies, perhaps,” he answers honestly. “Mine, for example. But as for Ancient Greece- this is the Ancient Greek sex education, Rose.”

“Oh,” she says, as if she wants to ask him more. “Is that why you’re so bottled-up?”

“Rose Tyler!” he yelps. “Mind your manners. Returning to our story, Daphnis and Chloe ask the old man what the remedy is for their affliction. The old man laughs and says ‘there is no remedy that can be eaten or drunk, or uttered in song, save kissing and embracing, and lying naked side by side.’”

The Doctor stops, more than a little aware of his position in relation to Rose in that moment.

“And then what happens, Doctor?”

He swallows.

“Doctor?”

His voice is very gravelly, now. Hormones and human-y thoughts and fantasies are rolling around in his head. He need only move an inch…

“Well, of course they take him literally, and set themselves to applying their medicine. First they kiss, but it cures nothing.”

“And then?”

Based by the look in her eyes, he thinks in this moment she would welcome him…

“Secondly they kiss and embrace, but still it cures nothing. I don’t know… I don’t know if I should be-“

Because she’s drunk, and very young, and possibly also very lonely. He’s been touching her up all night, getting her riled, a mere (human) biological reaction to external stimuli.

“Tell me.”

“Finally, they are brave enough to undress and lay down together in the Grotto of the Nymphs on the soft, wet moss. They kiss, and kiss, and kiss in each other’s arms, thinking this the consummation of love. But there is no culmination; no cure. Instead they go on, kissing and kissing, inflamed and longing for more, but not knowing what.”

She doesn’t know what she wants, not really. What she’d be getting from him.

They are both quiet, lost in their thoughts for a moment.

“I’ve never been kissed like that,” Rose breaks the silence. “I know it’s meant to be funny. But- I dunno, sounds kinda nice, too. You know, to be kissed with… passion, without intent. I wish just once in my life I would be.”

“You will be,” he says heatedly, leaning down to brush her hair tenderly from where it is pillowed.

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” he says, removing his hand and twisting his face into a carefree smile. “Bright, pretty, friendly girl like you- you have suitors falling at your feet wherever we go. You’ll find one of them you like, soon enough.”

Rose goes rigid.

“That’s not what- you don’t understand, I-” she says, turning onto her side away from him. “I think I’m drunk. I should get some sleep, Doctor.”

Bereft of her warmth in a sudden flash, he finds himself disconcerted. What just happened?

“Goodnight, Rose Tyler,” he murmurs, shutting off the light and returning to his chair on the other side of the cabin.

And if during the night, he can sense the addition of saline in the air, he brushes it off- because Rose Tyler quietly crying herself to sleep wouldn’t make any sense, of course. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying this story!


	5. Hurt, hatchets, nightmares and dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve never been kissed like that,” Rose breaks the silence. “I know it’s meant to be funny. But- I dunno, sounds kinda nice, too. You know, to be kissed with… passion, without intent. I wish just once in my life I would be.”
> 
> “You will be,” he says heatedly, leaning down to brush her hair tenderly from where it is pillowed.
> 
> “Yeah?”
> 
> “Yes,” he says, removing his hand and twisting his face into a carefree smile. “Bright, pretty, friendly girl like you- you have suitors falling at your feet wherever we go. You’ll find one of them you like, soon enough.”
> 
> Rose goes rigid.
> 
> “That’s not what- you don’t understand, I-” she says, turning onto her side away from him. “I think I’m drunk. I should get some sleep, Doctor.”
> 
> Bereft of her warmth in a sudden flash, he finds himself disconcerted. What just happened?
> 
> “Goodnight, Rose Tyler,” he murmurs, shutting off the light and returning to his chair on the other side of the cabin.
> 
> And if during the night, he can sense the addition of saline in the air, he brushes it off- because Rose Tyler quietly crying herself to sleep wouldn’t make any sense, of course.

Rose spends the next morning hungover and hurt. And she knows she’s being rather snappish with him, but she can’t seem to help it after last night.

Cause she feels like he’s endlessly tugging her back and forth, and before long he’ll have split her right down the middle. And she’s not sure if she’ll be able to pull herself back together after that point. Despite her better judgement, she’d actually hoped he’d kiss her last night. It would be one thing if he always treated her like she was just a mate, but then he goes and behaves in a way which makes her think she might have a chance after all. It’s horrible, the hoping.

On his own part, he’s rather skittish around her, sending her alarmed glances like she’s a stray animal who’s obviously gone a bit feral and might bite him at any moment.

There are no stories in the laundry room as they work today. And the look of relief on his face when Ida comes in mid-morning and pulls him out to help them with some problem with the drill is absolutely heartbreaking. 

The rest of her morning proves very lonely.

Come lunchtime, she’s rather desperate to bury the hatchet with him. She knows she isn’t necessarily being fair to him; he’s under a lot of stress, too. He’s lost his home, so soon after losing his whole planet. Found himself in a position so utterly alien to him. She can’t even begin to imagine what he’s feeling right now, and she’d come on to him just as strong, and how was he supposed to react? What man, tipsy and upset, wouldn’t consider drowning his sorrows with a willing mate who he knew fancied him, especially when there were hardly any other women around? Of course he’d been tempted, till he’d realised it was her and thought better of it.

There’s two people to blame here. She needs to stop pushing the boundaries of their friendship if she wants him to stop building her hopes up. If she really loved him, she’d be there for him the way he needs – as a friend. 

But he’s not in Habitat 3, and when she asks the Ood serving at the cafeteria counter they tell her that he’s not yet come to have lunch. So instead of grabbing her own meal, she decides to make the Doctor up a tray full of foodstuffs she knows he likes and bring it to him. A peace offering.

As she thought, he’s in the control room working still. And his bonding attempts thus far must be working pretty well, because he’s huddled at the console with Ida and Zach, sexy specs firmly upon his nose and in full steerage of the computer. Scattered around them are papers filled with graphs and mathematical equations Rose can’t read, written in a few different hands including his own rough English scrawl (a script which isn’t nearly as elegant as his own language, but Rose adores it all the same for being his). They’re talking rapidly, tossing technical words back and forth.

They don’t notice her standing in the doorway with the tray, and barely seem to acknowledge her entering the room- obviously wrapped up in whatever important problem they are trying to solve. But it’s what happens next that really distresses Rose.

Ida says something science-y to the group, and the Doctor breaks into a beaming smile.

“Oh, but you’re brilliant, Ida Scott,” he says with that soft, chuffed voice that has always made Rose feel so damn special.

Like he saw something in her… worthwhile. Like she could really be someone.

Like he really cared.

And all her noble intentions come crashing down again as he reminds her that she is nothing to him, not even someone he needs as a friend. 

When actually he’s just a charming git who picks up people like shiny objects wherever he goes, and then discards them again. Who was either lying when he said he was all alone in the universe, or didn’t really regard humans as people at all.

Rose clangs the tray down in front of him and storms off down the hallway, and he must notice now because he goes running out after her. 

“What the hell is wrong with you today?” he huffs, standing there gaping at her as if she’s lost her mind.

“Nothing,” she mumbles petulantly, shrugging her shoulders disingenuously, fidgeting before him as she struggles not to run.

“Like I’ll believe that,” he snorts. “Come on, out with it.”

And then she says something very catty indeed.

“No, just surprised you’ve already got a shiny new toy to play with. Didn’t think she was quite pretty enough for you, but you’ll always make do, I guess.”

The Doctor straightens perceptibly, and suddenly he is every inch the Time Lord.

“Petty jealousy is beneath you, Rose,” he says quietly down his nose, disappointed and patronising and oh-so superior.

“Sorry,” she says, genuinely chastened.

Maybe she has lost her mind, or at least half a sense of who Rose Tyler is.

The Doctor quirks his eyebrows at her in angry disbelief and spins away on his feet, departing with a final snide remark. “Why don’t you go and do something useful, hmm?”

It’s designed to hurt, and it does.

She didn’t quite think he could do anything more to her today, but there it was. And she deserved it.

Rose returns to the laundry room in a daze, these thoughts roiling through her head. On autopilot, she begins unloading the washed sheets into the dryers. Three steps and she’s suddenly gripped with an all-encompassing fear. A surge of adrenaline fizzles through her body; the sheets fall from her hands to the ground with a wet thwack. The walls are closing in on her, the oxygen thinning. Rose is falling to the ground, too.

She wants to curl into a little ball and never get back up; she wants to curl into a little ball and have him find her like that and kneel on the ground next to her and hold her and tell her everything is going to be okay. He loves her, and he’s so, so, sorry.

Neither of those scenarios can happen. Instead, Rose props herself against a dryer and tries desperately to breathe.

The steady burr of vibration against her back begins to unclench her chest. From out her jacket pocket her mobile comes thumbling; the brick of a device is perpetually charged thanks to the Doctor’s sonic, and Rose has continued carrying it with her just in case. She holds it up in the air as far as she can reach with an arm that feels heavier than usual; uselessly, desperately grasping for a signal. Calls herself a stupid twat, and starts looking through her old messages instead. Her Mum, Mickey, Shireen… all so far away now. God, at points she’d even _wanted_ to feel far away from them, far away from shops and the Estate and date nights at the pub when the match was on. Now she’d do anything to feel connected to them again.

Then there’s her photos, grainily shot but precious. Mickey pulling faces on an alien planet, the Doctor smiling boyishly out of his current face… further back, his old, leather jacketed-self who she’d thought hung the moon, either mugging for the camera or pushing it away. Captain Jack- poor, dead, Captain Jack, who’d kissed her softly on Satellite 5 and told her she was worth dying for and then gone off to do so.

She’d never have had the confidence to be such easy friends with a man like him before; handsome, smart, charming and worldly. But the old Doctor had built her confidence up so much by that point that she’d just taken Jack’s genuine offer of friendship in stride. And she was so much the better for it.

They’d been such a team, the three of them. Those had been some of the best days of her life. Even with Mickey, in Cardiff Bay.

How happy the four of them all look together in that shot.

Her chest loosens a bit more; she begins to breathe again.

She gets up, she has a job to do.

Without the Doctor there helping her, Rose works at the laundry well into dinner. When she is finally finished, she just trudges back to their cabin and crawls into bed, completely worn out and without having eaten since breakfast. Well, at least she might finally lose some weight if she keeps up like this, she thinks, remembering what Mickey said to her in that chippy in Deffrey Vale.

She lies there for some time, still alone, trying not to cry. Wishing he’d come back to their room. Worried about what he’ll say when he does. 

Late into the night, the Doctor enters their cabin with a wary look about him.

“Doctor,” she smiles gently from her pillow in greeting, hoping he’ll recognise the olive branch.

“Rose,” he nods carefully, walking straight to his chair.

“Did you sort the problem with the drill?”

“Yes.”

“Laundries all done,” she trills. “You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Monosyllables it is, then. She wants desperately for him to ask her how she did, without him, today. A little time ago he said he didn’t want to leave her alone on this job; has he already forgotten?

He’d ask, and she’d tell him she went into Toby’s cabin alone to deliver his washed clothes and take out his dirty ones and change his bedlinen for him, and he’d said filthy things to her, and she’d felt dirty and ashamed and scared. Still does, really.

Fancy wanting to tell the Doctor that, as if she was almost glad to have something so terrible to say because it might bring back his attention. She was petty this morning and pettier still.

And he doesn’t care, not really.

“I am really sorry about earlier, you know,” she says instead.

The Doctor looks at her silently for a moment.

“What _is_ wrong with you lately?” he asks incisively, without judgement; as if genuinely wanting to know.

Rose struggles for the words. “I’m just… going through some stuff. It’s hard to explain to you…”

“Right.”

“I’m trying... not to. But it’s hard, sometimes… I dunno if you’d really understand,” she half-chuckles nervously. 

“You’re afraid,” he tries. “I understand that.”

“Yeah, sorta I guess. It’s complicated…”

The look on his face is inscrutable.

“Shall I turn off the light?” Rose asks.

“If you like.”

They fall asleep together wordlessly on opposite sides of the room, but the next morning things have eased between them. Little by little, with a slow and cautious Doctor, Rose feels the sutures between them begin to repair. 

Time passes by, and one day Rose wakes in their cabin in the middle of the nightshift to the Doctor moaning in his sleep, hissing and thrashing and crying out in pain. 

Blearily, clad in just her shirt and underwear (the little shorts are in the wash), she stumbles out of bed and over to where he is sleeping in his chair. 

“Doctor… Doctor…” she says, shaking his shoulders gently. “You’re having a nightmare.”

He awakens with a jolt and gives her a tortured look, his beautiful face contorted in pain and unusually bare, before grabbing her by the waist and hauling her into his lap.

“Ooft,” she cries, knees curling reflexively into his hold. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m here.”

Strong arms squeeze her tighter to him like a teddy bear. Rose rests her head on his chest.

“There, there,” she murmurs, stroking a pectoral. “I’m here.”

“Rose,” he presses into her crown, voice thick. 

“What were you dreaming about?”

“The war,” he mumbles slowly.

“Want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head.

“Want to tell me a story?”

A chuckle. “Careful, Rose Tyler. Don’t let on you’ve been asking me to tell you stories just to keep me distracted all along.”

She hums back good-humouredly. “What do you need, then?”

“Just let me hold you a bit longer.”

Rose leans down to get the blanket from where it’s carelessly fallen. His hands stiffen on her in alarm.

“Don’t go, please,” he says urgently.

“I won’t,” she says. “’M just cold. Putting the blanket back over us so you can hold me all night, if you want to.”

A big hand slides across to cup her hip and she feels him growl in pleasure deep in his chest. His thumb plays absentmindedly with the scalloped edge of her knickers, and she thinks he probably doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Rose feels herself drifting off to sleep in his arms…

The Doctor returns to consciousness some hours later with his nose buried in hair, and a lap full of soft, warm Rose. Performing a stocktake, he finds his hand clasping her firmly to him by her right hip, and his prick pushing insistently into the round flesh of her bottom. They only seem to be separated by the thin cotton of her knickers and his pinstripes, and the tempting, human-hot heat he can feel between her legs makes him want to thrust up into her; makes him want to burrow inside her and break like a wave on the shore. Were she awake, she’d definitely be able to identify the hard evidence of his desire too and then where would all his stupid, self-righteous defences be?

Thankfully she is fast asleep. 

He lifts her up in his arms and carries her back to her bed.

“Stay,” she mumbles, half-awake upon being deposited on the springy mattress.

“I can’t,” he answers, wanting.

“Please,” she beseeches, presenting him with the roundness of her backside to curl into. “’S not good for you, sleeping in that chair.”

Unable to resist anymore he falls into bed with her, and it feels like a surrender. Propriety keeps his hips carefully tilted away; longing marries her back to his chest. A soft, chaste kiss of thanks is pressed into her crown, and someone murmurs “thank you.”

After the week they had… the things that were said… still she’d come to him in benediction to soothe his nightmares, he thinks as he drifts off to sleep again. It might be wrong, what he’s doing, but he’s too tired to fight the feeling that finally he is at home in the bed of the woman of his dreams.

The next thing he knows, Ravel’s _Daybreak_ is sounding and his nose is nuzzling into the downy nape of her neck and his arms are anchoring her body to his body, and his treacherous hips have acquainted themselves with her bottom again. He freezes, and then she does.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be,” she murmurs.

He releases her, flopping onto his back.

“It’s just a physical reaction,” Rose tries again to mollify him. 

“I’m so sorry,” he repeats desolately, staring at the ceiling.

“Hey, hey,” she says, turning to sidle up to the Doctor and cup his pale, freckled cheek in her palm. “I know it’s not for me. I know you’re just a man. I’m not gonna read anything into it, okay? And you aren’t gonna offend me.”

“Yeah?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah,” she says seriously, then gives him a mischievous smile. “God, so all your people really were this repressed?”

He rolls his eyes, huffing out a disbelieving laugh. “Yes, actually.”

“Why?” she says, trailing her hand down to stroke his arm soothingly. 

“Reasons.”

“What reasons?” 

“Cultural norms to do with becoming a long-lived species after our primary evolutionary period.”

“What does that mean?”

“We… evolved through sexual reproduction, like you. Then we developed technologically. Then we gave ourselves the longer lifespans. So there had to be the stigma, to avoid rampant overpopulation. Can you imagine all those children, if we just gave into our lusts whenever-”

“Whenever you fell for someone enough to want to have a family with them?”

“Yeah,” he says sadly, turning onto his side.

Beautiful brown doe eyes blink back at her.

“That sounds really lonely.”

“Yeah,” he agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments and kudos if you are enjoying this story and would like more!


	6. Earthquakes and other fearsome things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We… evolved through sexual reproduction, like you. Then we developed technologically. Then we gave ourselves the longer lifespans. So there had to be the stigma, to avoid rampant overpopulation. Can you imagine all those children, if we just gave into our lusts whenever-”
> 
> “Whenever you fell for someone enough to want to have a family with them?”
> 
> “Yeah,” he says sadly, turning onto his side.
> 
> Beautiful brown doe eyes blink back at her.
> 
> “That sounds really lonely.”
> 
> “Yeah,” he agrees.

From that time forth, and without ever discussing it in words, the Doctor and Rose begin sleeping tangled up together each night. From their bed, lying in the dark, in various permutations of entwinement, it feels like them and only them against the terrifying void beating down upon them.

Some nights, Rose lays on her side and lets the Doctor sidle up to her and thread his legs through hers and cross his arm over her belly and curl his chest against her back and tuck his pelvis into her bottom. Other nights, Rose sprawls on her back and the Doctor half-collapses over her, his nose nuzzling into the crook between her neck and shoulders. Other nights still they reverse, and Rose lays herself over him and rests her cheek against his chest and lets him wrap his long arms securely around her, holding her to him like a benediction. It’s warmth, and comfort, and home, this thing that they find themselves doing. It’s all that and somehow more.

He still has his nightmares, but sometimes she wakes with them and holds him and rubs his back or runs her fingers through his hair and coos sweet nothings in his ear until he calms. He can’t bring himself to repent it, this waking of her to sate his own selfish needs (because it feels so good), and he hopes she doesn’t think he’s too strange a bedfellow. 

Other nights, he wakes from his nightmares without disturbing her, and finds comfort in the firm anchor of her body against him. He can distract himself by cataloguing her features; there’s Rose’s toes, and Rose’s nose, and Rose’s chin, and Rose’s pretty, sooty eyelashes fluttering in dream (he hopes it’s a good one). He can tell himself that he’s between her and the door, and there’s no other way into their cabin, and that means that anyone who wants to hurt her must therefore go through him first where he’ll kill them with his bare hands, rip them apart with his bare teeth if he has to. He’s not a man who was brought up to feel like an animal, but it feels very animal, that part of him; like he’s a lion guarding his lioness in their den.

Another part that feels very animal are the times when he lays awake on purpose, looking down at her in his arms and imaging what it would be like to cover her entire body in kisses. Would she giggle and shove him off, he asks himself, if he licked that crook between her neck and her shoulder where he often likes to rest his weary head? He’s so close, already, and it would just take a minute little leap further to do it; an opening of mouth, a darting out of wet tongue. And what would she do if he held her left leg open and pressed his lips to the inside of her ankle? If he slowly trailed those kisses upward, until his face was buried in the musky, heady warmth she kept between her thighs and he could devour every inch of her sweet, sweet nectar? Has anyone ever done that to her before (surely not Mickey the idiot), and would she like it? Would she bite her lip, shy, as he pleased her, or wrap her legs around his head and grind against his mouth?

Needless to say, this means that sometimes she wakes feeling his erection pressed against her in addition to his body. But she never makes a fuss of it.

Intimacy without shame; for the Doctor, it is a revelation.

One terrible night, they are both woken by the blare of an alarm and the rumble of an earthquake. Drowsily jumping into action, the Doctor speeds up his body’s production of catecholamines and quickly processes that there is no time to move her to a safer place. The only course of action is to flip Rose onto her back and brace himself over her, one arm shielding her delicate head and the other buttressed against her shoulder.

The world doesn’t end, but it does shake. 

“Are you frightened?” he says urgently, looking down, face strained and mere inches from hers.

“You make me feel safe,” she stumbles out, with a little too much honesty in her eyes.

It passes quickly; thankfully, this time it’s only a small disturbance. 

During the day, the Doctor is starting to be trusted a little more with solving difficult problems on the base, though the majority of his time is still spent with her in the laundry. Luckily, he’s there with her when the next alarm blares.

It’s bigger, this time.

The room begins to shake heavily.

“Come on,” the Doctor roars, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her to the linen cupboard. 

He pushes her to her knees under the sturdiest shelf and covers her body with his, bracing them both with an arm against a metal strut on the wall, the only thing he can find to hold on to for dear life.

Around them, the shaking intensifies. The clangs of items falling to the floor make Rose flinch at first. She raises her head to glance at the Doctor, and finds him pale and frantic. 

“Head down,” he spits through clenched teeth.

She obeys, but can’t help but laugh.

“What?” he rasps into her ear, as if she’s lost her very senses.

“Remember Downing Street?”

The rocking stops, and the Doctor starts to laugh too; a deep, belly laugh, relieved and crazed.

“Sorry,” Rose smiles impishly. “You okay? You didn’t get hit by anything, did you?”

He gapes, incredulous. “I thought _you_ might have been when you started laughing!”

“Nah, just, come on- all this time and everything that’s happened. Mates swapping their faces and us losing the TARDIS and getting stuck half-way across the universe, and, and so much, only didn’t it feel like we were right back there hiding in that cupboard in Downing Street again? S’like nothing changed.”

“Your mind, sometimes,” he shakes his head, mystified.

“Come on, you know what I mean! Isn’t life crazy? Still can’t believe I ever got to go to Downing Street. Me, of all people.”

“Oh, well that bits not so mystifying,” he drawls confidently, shooting her a roguish grin. “You’d be a great PM! Maybe that’s what you would have done, if I hadn’t run off with you.”

Now it is Rose’s turn to look bewildered. “Are you sure you didn’t get hit on the head?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Hello, it’s me you’re talking to, Rose Tyler. Think you might have had to finish school to run for office.”

“I’m serious! You’d be great at getting everyone stirred up and organised, fighting the good fight for the regular folk to be better treated, Ood or otherwise. Instead I get you trapped with me in a series of cupboards across time and space that all coincidently feature a roof about to cave in over our heads.” 

“We’ve survived the scourge of the cupboards so far, though,” Rose jokes, reeling a little at his description of her and not yet picking up on the maudlin turn his thoughts were taking. “Do you really think I’m like that?”

“Wouldn’t have said so otherwise. And I’m glad we’re surviving, but this is the third earthquake we’ve had since we landed here, and the first one destroyed a good part of this station and sent my TARDIS hurtling into the ground. I’m beginning to worry we might be living on more of a death trap than I originally thought, and if you recall, I originally thought this station was a complete death trap.”

The memory of the night of the second earthquake finally tugs on her.

“Are _you_ frightened?” she echoes back at him.

He swallows and looks away, Adam’s apple bobbing thickly in his throat.

It takes him several heavy seconds to answer.

“I… I can’t lose you too,” he says finally, giving her a small, sad little sliver of a smile. 

“You said the TARDIS was the only thing you had to lose,” Rose replies, trying to keep her tone even-handed.

The Doctor’s eyes widen.

“Rose- you aren’t a _thing_ I _have_.”

“Oh.”

“Did I hurt you, when I said that?” he asks, tender and soft and concerned.

She shakes her head, shrugging bashfully. “A little- I thought… I dunno.”

“You thought I didn’t care,” he inhales. “Oh, Rose, I thought I was so obvious. There’s nothing in this universe that scares me more than you in danger. When I heard that alarm…”

He shakes his head; he can’t seem to finish the thought.

“We would have died together, though,” Rose says matter-of-factly, as if that would be good and fine.

“What?” he gasps, terror seizing at his hearts.

“I’m just saying,” she explains, a little less certain this time. “If this room fell into the ground just then, we’d both fall with it at the same time. We wouldn’t be around to realise the other had died, and we wouldn’t die alone. So there’d be no need to be scared.”

“Rose. No, you, you can’t-”

“No, s’just-”

The Doctor goes cold. “I really can’t believe how cavalier you are with your own life sometimes.”

“ _I’m_ cavalier!” she admonishes, losing her temper right back at his unexpected, should-have-been-predictable temperature change. “No- you know what, let’s not do this now. We’re sitting here arguing when we should be going to check and see if the others are okay.”

“Sorry. You’re right. Come on,” he says, offering her a helping hand up.

She takes it, and he’s thankful that despite everything she keeps it, too. 

  
In the laundry room, things are spilled absolutely everywhere. There’s soapy laundry detergent running across the floor, and every carton of dirty clothes and sheets are overturned. She has to steady the Doctor through their joined hands as his sneakers slip.

“Oh, I’m going to have to clean all this up later, aren’t I?” Rose moans to herself.

“Not by yourself you’re not.” the Doctor smiles.

Rose smiles back.

The rest of the base is the same- anything not locked down is absolutely topsy-turvy. Hand still encased in hand, the Doctor and Rose start carefully making their way towards the centre of the base. 

“Do you hear-“ starts Rose.

“-yelling down that way,” finishes the Doctor, breaking into a run. 

As they come barrelling into the control room, their eyes are immediately drawn to the footage displayed on the holo-screen at the centre of the console.

It’s carnage. Rose gasps, and the Doctor releases her hand to take out his glasses with a grimace.

The footage is of the progress in the tunnel, and it shows that the drill has fallen from its masthead; one Ood looks to have been trapped under it, and another three are lying on the rocky ground bleeding. The other Ood who work the shaft are huddled into a corner, holding their heads and convulsing.

“Glad you two are alright,” nods Captain Zachary Cross-Flane at them both, before returning to the heated conversation that is happening between his crew.

“Come on guys, we need to at least _try_ and recover some of the stock,” says Dany, shaking his long, curly black hair out of his ponytail. “I can dampen the telepathic field to subdue the ones that are panicking, but someone really needs to get down there and round them up.”

“Look, I should go down, I’m our authorised first aid officer,” says Ida. 

“Authorised _human_ first aid officer,” Scooti corrects. “Isn’t veterinary care your job, Dany?”

“Yeah, Dany, stop being such a coward,” wheedles Toby.

Dany opens his mouth, offended and about to let everyone know it. 

“Now hold on,” Zach interrupts them with a hand. “I don’t know that _anyone_ is going down there yet.”

The Doctor watches Rose’s eyes widen predictably.

“How can you say that?” Rose exclaims, cutting into the argument. “Look at them- they’re scared, they’re in pain.”

He thinks it must be rather sickening, the adoring look he can’t help but shoot her. Luckily, she doesn’t see, but he reckons the rest of the crew probably has.

“I know,” Zach replies calmly. “But we need to think through the risks carefully before we take any action.”

“What’s there to think through?” Rose scowls, hands moving to her hips. “There’s four of them could be bleeding to death down there while we’re wasting time.”

She’s a proper heroine, his Rose, magnificent in her fierceness as much as her softness. 

“There’s just been an earthquake, and we don’t know how unstable the tunnel is,” Zach reasons. “We send people in, and it collapses further- that’s more crew deaths, putting the whole mission potentially at risk.”

“The work the Ood do is also mission critical,” says Ida. “There’s a risk to doing nothing, too.” 

“I’m a medical Doctor,” the Doctor interjects. “Let me go down. No risk to the mission.”

“That’s nowhere near protocol,” Zach grouses.

“He’s a civilian,” says Toby. “He dies, that’s on your head, Captain.”

“That’s on no one’s head but mine,” beseeches the Doctor. 

“That is if we can trust him not to sabotage the drill once he’s down there to get to his ship,” Toby adds.

“Trust him, are you kidding me, Toby?” Rose snaps back, furious. “The Doctor’d never do that, he’s just trying to help them, cause he’s actually a decent person who cares about other people unlike _you_.”

A lump of heat settles in the Doctor’s chest at her spirited defence of him. Because while she’s off being a heroine, she also makes him feel like a hero again. Like the man he always wanted to be. Like the man he sometimes could be, on his better days, before the war. Oh, he loves to mask in her misapprehension of his qualities, besotted fool that he is- but his hearts know that the truth is that while she may be a Chloe, he’s no Daphnis.

Toby’s next words shock the Doctor right out of his romantic contemplations, however.

“Oh, the Ood are people now, are they?” he smirks at Rose. “And we should listen to your obviously _educated_ opinion because- hold on, what exactly do you do around here besides change our sheets and suck his-”

Two quick steps and he’s got Toby backed away from her. 

“Don’t you dare talk to Rose like that,” the Doctor snarls, incensed; fists clenching at his sides.

“Calm down, all of you,” Ida commands.

The Doctor steps back, breathing heavily. Stalking back towards Rose, he meets her eyes. She looks scared and embarrassed. He’s livid as the implication lands.

How humiliated it must make her feel, he thinks, to have the crew think she’d do… _that_ … with _him._ And he’d practically set her up for it, hadn’t he, by claiming her as his wife.

“I’m sorry, that was out of line,” says Toby, holding up his hands towards the Doctor with an insincere smile. “I’m just saying- a more rational plan would be to let the Ood calm down and sort it out themselves. That’s why we have them in the tunnels, rather than risking human lives. I’m only trying to look out for us all, and the mission.”

The Doctor glares at him murderously.

Zach’s eyes flit between them all and the holo-screen, and he makes a decision.

“Alright. The earthquake has stopped, and there’s been no further movement detected in the tunnel so far- it’s worth taking some risk to recover the Ood. Doctor, Rose, Ida down the shaft and assessing the damage. Scooti, get the med kits from the infirmary then go down after them. Dany up here on telepathic dampeners, Toby on comms. That is an order.”

Commands given, the crew scatters. 

“Rose is staying here,” declares the Doctor to Zach, knowing how she’ll react before he even says the words but needing to try anyway.

  
“No chance!” she cries.

The Doctor gives her a doleful, defeated frown which she meets stubbornly before moving to follow after Ida. 

“Hey, she’s _your_ missus, mate,” Zach shrugs in surrender, slapping him on the back. “ _I’m_ sure as hell not looking to cross her again tonight. Fearsome thing she is, that one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying reading this story!


	7. Tourniquet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright. The earthquake has stopped, and there’s been no further movement detected in the tunnel so far- it’s worth taking some risk to recover the Ood. Doctor, Rose, Ida down the shaft and assessing the damage. Scooti, get the med kits from the infirmary then go down after them. Dany up here on telepathic dampeners, Toby on comms. That is an order.”
> 
> Commands given, the crew scatters. 
> 
> “Rose is staying here,” declares the Doctor to Zach, knowing how she’ll react before he even says the words but needing to try anyway.
> 
> “No chance!” she cries.
> 
> The Doctor gives her a doleful, defeated frown which she meets stubbornly before moving to follow after Ida. 
> 
> “Hey, she’s your missus, mate,” Zach shrugs in surrender, slapping him on the back. “I’m sure as hell not looking to cross her again tonight. Fearsome thing she is, that one.”

The three of them pack into the small elevator, shoulder to shoulder.

“You’re a medical doctor?” Ida breaks the silence as they hurtle down through the earth together.

“Yes,” he answers solemnly. 

“And you?” Ida turns to Rose.

“’m not anything.”

“Rose is good in a crisis,” the Doctor interposes. “And you’re the bases first aid officer, you said?”

“Yes, but- _just_ a first aid officer. I don’t know how much I can do for them, based on that footage.”

“I know,” the Doctor says grimly. “It’s alright.”

“If anyone can help them, the Doctor can,” Rose offers with gentle surety.

Out of the corner of her eye, she seems him blink in surprise. 

When the lift doors finally creek open, he falls into his usual natural lead and begins assessing the situation like it’s a battlefield. There are four Ood who have been injured, all in various states of consciousness, as well as the wider group of drill workers who are huddling in the corner, traumatised.

“Right, triage,” the Doctor says sharply, rubbing his hands together. “Ida, check our friend over there for any serious injuries. Rose, come with me.”

But she finds herself unable to brush past the distressed beings huddling in the corner without offering something.

“It’s gonna be alright,” she stops to say to them.

“Rose, come!” calls the Doctor, his voice having gained urgency as he kneels besides the first injured Ood, and she scampers after him like the obedient little spaniel he laughed to think of her as back in that parallel universe. 

This Ood is clearly bleeding badly from it’s thigh, Rose sees as she reaches the Doctor’s side. She watches as he pulls his tattered tie from his suit jacket and wraps it around the damaged limb like a tourniquet. He has to manipulate the limb to do so, and the Ood flinches and then begins to writhe in something recognisable as fear, its gloved fingers clawing at the red dirt, though it does not speak a word.

“Hey, shh, it’s only us,” Rose soothes, reaching out to stoke its hand. “The Doctor’s here to make you better.” 

Bespectacled chocolate brown eyes flick to hers, dark and serious and surprised.

She watches him swallow. 

“Doctor?”

“T-Till we have the kits” he rushes out, running a hand through his hair as if to shake his earlier thoughts away. “And I can operate, I need you to stay here and keep the pressure on, tight as you can.”

“H-how do I…?”

“Here, like this,” he says, unclasping her hands from the Ood’s and manipulating them into place on the tourniquet with his own. “That’s it. There you go. Keep it like that, keep him calm so he doesn’t dislodge it. Alright, Rose?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Then he’s gone, dashing back to Ida.

“How is he?” she hears the Doctor ask. 

“Just shallow wounds, so far as I can see. Like from rocks flinging across the room when the drill crashed,” Ida responds. “No major blood loss.”

“Good. Come on,” he says, and they move to inspect the third injured Ood. 

The elevator is called back up, probably by Scooti, Rose thinks. That means that the med kits are coming; that’s good.

“Nearly there,” she says softly to the Ood lying beside her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

But, an errant thought enters her mind- the elevator leaving does mean they’re trapped down here with no escape. It’s scary thought, that. What would happen if there was another earthquake? What if the lift broke right now- would anyone on the base know how to fix it?

They’d quite possible die a terrifying death, crushed by rocks quickly or running out of oxygen slowly in this small, rocky cavern. That’s of course why the Doctor didn’t want her to come, she thinks.

The silly man; whatever happens down here, she’d rather be by his side. 

“Looks like a head wound,” the man in question is saying to Ida. “We’ll need to stabilise and pack around it with something cool to reduce the swelling. Are there ice packs in the kits?”

“Yes,” Ida nods.

“Alright,” he leaps up, all energy. “Onto our final patient! Allons-y, Ida Scott.”

Their final patient is the Ood who was trapped under the drill when it fell. The poor being is still alive, and writhing, wriggling in wordless pain. Rose sees the Doctor and Ida share a horrified look.

“What is it?” she calls to them from across the room. 

They ignore her.

All the Oods in the corner calm suddenly, straightening up.

“Danny on comms,” says Toby’s voice through the communicator around Ida’s belt, the little light flashing from red to green.

“Go ahead,” says Ida.

“Telepathic dampeners are up,” crackles Danny. “Their distress should be eased, but they’ll be pretty useless until the dope wears off. You’ll probably need to practically herd them back up.”

“But he’s still moving,” Rose states, nodding towards the Ood trapped under the drill.

“He’s likely in too much pain for the dampeners to work,” explains the Doctor sombrely.

The elevator lands and Scooti comes out the door with two large med kits. The Doctor sends Ida off with one kit to pack the head of the unconscious Ood with ice, and takes the other kit back to Rose.

“Now, how are you going, here?” he asks gently, inspecting how she’s done keeping the tourniquet together. “Looking just fine. Good job.”

“That’s good,” she murmurs, relieved and just a little pleased that she’s followed his instructions correctly, despite her lack of experience. 

“Now I’m going to need you to help me some more, okay?”

Rose nods and the Doctor hurriedly begins unpacking the med kit, taking out some gloves for them to put on (though Rose doesn’t quite understand why, as their hands are already soaked in blood). Then he’s procuring a needle, some surgical thread, rubbing alcohol, a slim torch, and a few other bits and pieces she doesn’t recognised and laying them all out on a metallic tray.

He asks her to hold the torch light steady on the wound as he operates, and Rose gets hypnotised by his dexterous fingers, almost elegant even among the carnage of flesh. Every now and then she’s asked to hand him different items; when she doesn’t know something by name, he catches her confusion and patiently describes it to her by shape. The Doctor really knows what he’s doing; he’s an excellent physician. All intense, intelligent concentration as his fingers dance, and Rose wonders once again why she ever thought a man as impressive as him would be interested in someone like her.

But there’s just so much blood, gushing out of the wound and splashing on the Doctor’s trousers, soaking his sleeves. And she can see him beginning to panic, underneath the stoic veneer.

And the Ood is getting stiller.

More blood rushes out suddenly and the Doctor makes a frustrated sound deep in the back of his throat.

Then the Ood’s chest stops moving altogether.

“Don’t you dare!” the Doctor cries, ploughing through the kit to find a large needle containing a bluish liquid.

“Ida,” he bellows. “Does adrenaline work on them the same as on humans, to restart their hearts?”

Ida presses down on her communicator, lighting it up green again. “Danny, does adrenaline restart Ood hearts?”

“Yes,” Danny’s scratchy voice comes through.

The Doctor plunges the needle into the Ood’s chest.

“Come on, come on!” he shouts, teeth clenched; watching desperately for any sign of breath.

But there’s nothing.

A life slips away before their eyes.

The Doctor’s hands fall to his side. He doesn’t look at her, but Rose can see his face; he looks distraught.

“I’m sorry,” she says, not sure to whom she speaks; both of them, probably.

“Yeah,” he clips, staring at a spot on the ground before recovering himself and leaping to his feet.

Rose runs after him as he dashes back to Ida and her patient.

“Good, good,” he’s saying, checking the work she’s done. “Swellings reducing.”

“That’s good,” Ida confirms, a little breathless, a little excited; caught up in the swirling vortex that is the Doctor showing you something new about yourself, Rose thinks. 

It’s an intoxicating feeling, Rose knows, and rightly or wrongly, the horror doesn’t often outweigh it.

Then he says something to Ida in a lower voice, as if it isn’t intended for Rose to hear at all. “Will any of the chemicals in this kit euthanise?”

“No. No, I don’t think so, um…”

“Give me your communicator,” the Doctor commands, frustrated. “Danny, is there any way to euthanise?”

“What’s euthanise mean?” asks Rose, but he only gives her a dark look in reply.

“Not in the med kits,” Danny’s voice crackles through. “We could… but I don’t have time to isolate that Ood.”

“What about severing the windpipe, is it the same as on humans?” the Doctor asks.

“Yes,” Danny answers. 

The Doctor picks up his scalpel and stoicly strides towards the Ood trapped under the drill, his lips pressed into a tight line.

“Doctor, what are you doing?” Rose asks, apprehensive. 

He doesn’t answer or look up at her, but rather kneels down and quickly slices the Ood clean across its throat, blood splattering across his clothes. 

“Oh,” she hears herself gasp, and watches the life drain out of a sentient being’s eyes for the second time that night.

The Doctor strides back to grab the med kit, refusing to meet her eyes, and then walks straight over to the last injured Ood; the one Ida said had only minor wounds. New gloves go on; some bandages, a fresh scalpel and some cleaning alcohol come out, but when the Doctor kneels down to work it starts to shake.

He ignores it, placing one hand on its torso to begin cutting out a piece of embedded rock in the worst injury, but the moment the blade slips through skin the Ood reacts violently, writhing and thrashing in an attempt to escape.

The Doctor reacts with more force, attempting to pin it; arms fly everywhere, and one smacks the Doctor across the face. 

“Ah,” he cries, dropping the scalpel as blood pours from his nose.

Rose and Ida run to help him but it’s too late; the Ood grabs his dropped scalpel and slashes at the Doctor. He jumps back, narrowly avoiding the blade touching his skin, but it tears a long cut in his pinstriped jacket.

“Hold it down!” he shrieks, frantic.

With some effort they each grab an arm, placing pressure on the shoulders while the Doctor struggles with its lower legs. Eventually, the three of them have it pinned like a butterfly. Scooti hovers anxiously somewhere behind them, looking very young.

“Are you alright?” Rose asks the Doctor, unable to help herself.

“Fine,” he grits, still without meeting her eyes.

Rose takes him in as he resumes his work, a well of sympathy and pain building in her chest. A deep, purple bruise is developing across his skin, and his poor nose looks as if it’s been wacked out of place. His clothing is covered in the blood of his patients; his own blood musses his lips and chin.

She wonders if this was what it was like for him in the war.

She could imagine he got called in to help patch people up, and ended up being asked to kill.

She knows how much that would have broken his good, kind soul. And now he’s having to do it all again; she can’t imagine the memories that this must be stirring in him.

She wants to hold him, desperately, but she knows he wouldn’t welcome that right now. Wants to take it all away.

When he’s finished, he takes a large step back from them all. 

“Try and calm it enough that it’ll get into the elevator,” he says, rolling off his gloves. “It’s me it’s scared of. Scooti, let’s start evacuating the others. I don’t know about our last fellow- I don’t want to move him unrestrained with a head injury but it’s too dangerous staying here.”

Only a small amount of Ood can fit into the small elevator at once, and Danny’s right, they are pretty disorientated like this. Scooti and the Doctor take turns accompanying groups of them up. Finally, Scooti is left up there and the Doctor makes one final trip to see if he can find something stable to secure the Ood with the head injury to.

Rose steels her nerves as he disappears from her view again. She and Ida are the only ones left now, kneeling beside the last injured Ood to watch that he’s still breathing and wait.

Ida really is brilliant, Rose thinks, regretting her earlier patch of jealousy.

“Thanks for everything,” she says to Ida. “Not just this, but I mean up there too- wanting to come down, getting in between the Doctor and Toby.”

But Ida’s response is unexpectedly icy. “Do you think I did that for you?”

Roses eyebrows fly up. “No, that’s not what I meant, just-“

“You seem to think we don’t care for their welfare.”

“Well,” says Rose, taking a deep breath in. “I’m not trying to have a go, and I know every culture is different- but it just seems like in your world, they’re treated as less than human.”

“They aren’t human, and that means they shouldn’t be treated as such, no. That doesn’t mean we’re treating them badly.”

“I’m not trying to say you are bad people- you’ve been so good to us, taking us in when you didn’t know us at all, and I think you’re all lovely, really. I just think you’re wrong on this.”

“Don’t pretend to be so high and mighty and don’t pretend to be my friend.” Ida counters. “I heard what you said about me, the other day.”

“Oh,” Rose exhales wanly.

“Yeah,” she continues evenly. “Oh. Not half embarrassing having to listen to that in front of my Captain.”

They sit in silence for some moments.

“Look,” Rose offers. “I don’t know that it means I’m wrong about the Ood. But for what it’s worth, I _was_ wrong to say that about you, and I _am_ sorry.”

“Okay,” Ida replies, giving her a scrutinizing look.

“You should know, it-it wasn’t about anything you done. It’s… see, the Doctor- I used to think it was just me and him. But lately, he’s been going off with all these women who are prettier than me and smarter than me and I just-“ Rose brays, raising her eyes to the roof, trying to stop the embarrassing tears in them leaking out. “And I just sorta have trouble dealing with it, sometimes.”

Ida’s expression changes to sympathy at that.

But before she can respond, there’s a screech of interference on the communicator around her belt. Rose winces, and Ida fumbles to turn it off, the light blinking from green to red. Behind her, the elevator slides down into view, stopping with a clang. The Doctor exits the shaft with a body sized slab of metal, some rope, and some black bags. There’s another communicator tucked into his own waist, and the light on it is also green.

He gives her a rather hard look.

Rose freezes, filling with dread.

Then the Ood begins to seize and Rose can’t think about what exactly she said and whether he heard any of it anymore. She clutches uselessly at the ice packs, trying to hold them in place, as the Doctor runs towards them and Ida leaps back.  
  


“No, no, no” says the Doctor, pushing Rose roughly away. “Why is this happening?”

Looking up from where her forearms landed in the rough, red dirt, Rose sees the Ood seize so sharply that the round globe falls from its hands and rolls across the ground.

The Doctor is staring at it in dismay, and she thinks it must be because from this angle they all can see that the globe is cracked on the underside and inside it is a small, squishy, pink thing that is bleeding.

“But… that’s…” stutters the Doctor. 

“They’ve a second brain, a hindbrain, externally,” Ida says, standing behind them, looking down.

“You didn’t tell me,” he whips around, shocked.

“I thought you knew- everyone knows.”

“I missed it.”

“How do you not know that?” Ida asks sharply. “Where _are_ you people from, really?”

“I don’t know what to do, um…” he stammers, fumbling through the med kit for a solution.

But the Ood’s breathing stops anyway; it passes, too.

The Doctor falls back on his haunches, catatonic.

“Doctor?” Rose asks quietly.

He doesn’t respond, so she reaches a hand out to touch his arm-

“Rose,” Ida interrupts with a meaningful glance, gesturing for her to join her instead.

The black bags turn out to be body bags, and Ida shows Rose how to wrap them around the corpses. The Doctor seems to recover partially to help them with the last body, interposing his own body between her line of sight and the Ood trapped under the drill, but he’s still not saying a word.

And then there’s not enough room in the elevator for the three of them together along with the three bodies, and finally he speaks again to bid Rose and Ida go up first.

“No…“ Rose stammers, captured by the terror of being separated from him again.

“Rose, go!” he explodes, fury writ across his face.

She flinches before mumbling her assent.

As the elevator begins to climb up, Rose feels her face going red as she struggles to hold back the tears. She can see Ida looking at her, and turning the communicator off meaningfully.

“I don’t know why he picked me up in the first place,” she starts to sniffle, grateful for the chance to unburden herself. “And I think he was realising he made a mistake, before we got stuck here. And now he’s stuck with me.”

Ida takes her in quietly for a minute.

“Well, I don’t know that the evidence supports that,” she reasons. “You should see the way he looks at you.”

“I used to think that… that if he looked at me the way he does, sometimes it must mean- even if he couldn't say it, cause of the war... but now, I don’t know, I keep thinking... it was just wishful thinking.”

“Thought he was going to murder Toby earlier.”

“Nah," Rose shakes her head stubbornly. "He’s just embarrassed that anyone would think he’d do _that_ with me.”

“For god’s sake, if that’s true- we all know you’re married. What would we think was happening? And there’s another point. He married you; no one gets married these days unless they want to.”

Rose looks guilty.

“Oh,” Ida realises. “You lied.”

“Sorry. Please don’t say anything.”

She sighs.

“He was just trying to keep me safe,” Rose tries to explain. “Sleeping in the same cabin as him.”

Ida snorts at that. “Is he even a medical Doctor, then?”

“Yes… I mean, I think so.”

“You don’t know?”

“He’s told me so. And I’ve seen him help people.”

“How’d you even end up together?” Ida sighs again. 

“We just sorta met at my work. I was working in this shop that- well, it’s a long story, and a long, long way away from here. Saved my life, he did, then he asked me to go travelling with him.”

“And how long _had_ you known him at that point?”

“It-it sounds bad.”

“Not long, then. You’re clearly a lot younger, and you hardly seem to know any real facts about him. Should I be worried for you?” 

“No. That’s not how it is,” Rose defends heatedly. “I do know him. He’s the best man I’ve ever known, and I’m sorry we lied to you, but I think you feel it too. I heard it in your voice today.”

“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I’m less willing to bet my life on a good feeling, though.”

“Feelings haven’t always worked so bad for me, so far. Come to think of it, it’s usually when I’m ignoring my feelings that I make the wrong decision. But you don’t have to do that, go on evidence, then- he’ll keep showing you he’s a good man, like he did today.”

“Perhaps," Ida nods, considering her words. "But I'll mark that's a bit of a turnaround, from what you said about him earlier." 

Rose stills. "It doesn't make him a bad person, just because he doesn't love me." 

"Alright, Rose."

“Then you won’t tell anyone, or put us apart?” Rose asks, hating the pathetic, wheedling tone echoing through her voice once again. 

“It’s against protocol.”

“Please, Ida. I need to be with him.”

“I’ll think about what’s right, Rose.” 

“Okay,” she responds quietly, unable to do anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying this story!


	8. Shell-shock, shower, story, bed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose stills. "It doesn't make him a bad person, just because he doesn't love me." 
> 
> "Alright, Rose."
> 
> “Then you won’t tell anyone, or put us apart?” Rose asks, hating the pathetic, wheedling tone echoing through her voice once again. 
> 
> “It’s against protocol.”
> 
> “Please, Ida. I need to be with him.”
> 
> “I’ll think about what’s right, Rose.” 
> 
> “Okay,” she responds quietly, unable to do anything else.

Rose and Ida take the body bags to Danny and then head to the base’s shared, dormitory-style bathroom to wash the blood and dirt off of them. Ida showers quickly then exits, but Rose takes some time scrubbing at her body in the shower stall, feeling the hot, steady water stream beat down against her back.

When her body is clean again, she redresses in a long, white men’s shirt she snagged from her donated pack on the way past their cabin. The garment is too large on her to wear as anything other than pyjamas, swamping her frame and hitting her mid-thigh, and she suspects it must have belonged to the dead Captain Walker.

She’s brushing through her hair in the steamy mirror, considering her bare face under the warm fluorescent light and tossing around such morbid thoughts, when the bathroom door opens.

It’s the Doctor, looking bloody and shell-shocked and quite a bit surprised to see her.

“Sorry,” she says in a small voice, moving to go.

Obviously, he’d dragged his feet returning, hoping to avoid her- he won’t shower at the same time as her on his good days, let alone on a day like today. And she’s wondering if subconsciously she didn’t drag her feet all the same as him, just for the opposite reason. No wonder he’d shouted at her to stop clinging to him earlier.

But he shakes his head, and walks over to lean against the sink beside her.

“No, I’m sorry,” he says, placing his head in his hands.

Rose watches his shoulders begin to shake, and realises he’s silently crying.

“Hey,” she says softly, touching his shoulder and angling her head to try and see past his hands.

But he’s stiff and resistant beneath her palm.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cries, voice thick with tears.

There’s nothing to do but to envelop him in a big hug.

“I’m here,” she whispers, squeezing tight; feeling the tension leech out of him, feeling his body melt into her arms.

She holds him like that for a while, rocking him back and forth, feeling the wet press of his face against her clavicle.

“Oh, Rose,” he slurs.

“I-I know… today must have brought back memories for you of the war.”

The keen of distress he releases at that is deep, sharp… animal.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs. “You’re okay.”

He nods stiffly, a jarring little half-movement, and Rose releases him. Only a stolen little glance at his red face is allowed before he looks down at his hands, sees the blood on them, and gasps raggedly.

Rose thinks about her discussion with Ida, and makes a decision.

“Come on,” she says, reaching to lift his jacket off his shoulders. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

The Doctor mumbles an affirmative noise and proceeds to let her manipulate his body like a big, lanky Ken doll. The pinstriped jacket joins Roses clothes soaking in the sink, as does his shirt after she’s carefully unbuttoned it, trying not to gawk at his slender, masculine frame.

Though she’s determined not to take advantage of his vulnerability she can’t help but see and admire. He’s all pale skin and lean muscles and a forest of hair the same chocolate brown as the gorgeous mop on the top of his head.

Sometimes she’ll see a flash of that chest hair when he forgoes a tie and buttons up a little low, a little risqué. It always makes her want to run her fingers through it; scrape her teeth against it and mark him as hers. 

It’s an intoxicating thought that she shouldn’t be thinking right now. He’s intoxicating; he must know, what he does to her. And if he doesn’t, he must not find out tonight.

Rose kneels at his feet and unlaces his converses. _They’ve_ held up remarkably well, all things considered.

Finally, she stands again and hovers her hands over the button of his trousers.

“This alright?” she asks. “Promise I won’t look.”

“Yeah,” he croaks.

Eyes focused on his collarbone, she carefully unzips him and shrugs his pants and boxers down those slim hips of his in one fluid movement. They fall to the floor and she returns to a kneel, tapping on his lower leg to bid him step out of them.

Rose places them in the sink with the others and then goes to push open a shower stall, taking care not to look down at his now fully nude body (just standing there in front of her, as if that’s a _thing_ they _do_ ) when she walks past.

Once the water feels hot enough, she comes back out to get him, only to finds he moved his stance just slightly to the side, and unwittingly exposed himself to her in the mirror. There’s a sliver of a small, firm bottom reflected; a glance of a long, soft cock and a pair of heavy balls dangling tantalisingly between trim, hairy legs.

Forcing her eyes back up, she gently pushes on his shoulders to guide him to the shower, hoping he didn’t notice her noticing.

He’s behaving pretty uselessly, still, like the Ood after they’d had those telepathic dampeners put on, so Rose follows him in, locking the stall door behind her just in case.

It’s late, and no one on the base should be up and about at this time, but Rose wants to do all she can to protect the privacy she knows he values so well. It’s not that he’s got anything to be ashamed of, god knows he hasn’t, but what little she can gleam from him about his people seems to suggest such propriety is a cultural thing. And she’s learnt enough travelling with him to know to respect cultural things.

She hopes he doesn’t take her earlier, genuinely accidental eyeful of his lovely Time Lordbits as disrespectful.

The Doctor steps under the showerhead and lets the water beat down on him, and she hopes he enjoys the sensation after the day they’d had as much as she did earlier.

“Water temperature okay?” she asks him eagerly, sitting on the little ledge on the far wall of the stall where they’d usually leave their towel and fresh clothes. “Good pressure?”

He nods, turning back to face her and Rose can see the water dribbling down his face and shoulders, washing the blood away with it.

“I’ve been testing them all, you know,” she rambles. “Have you? I like this one best.”

A little hum is his only response; he’s obviously having difficulty mustering up words.

Well, she understands that; his last self could get like that fairly often. She lets it go quiet between them, crossing her legs, and finds her eyes dropping to the tiles on the floor and watching the blood swirling down the drain.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” he says after a while.

“Hey, hey. Enough of that, now.”

“It was a disaster, down there.”

“But not your fault.”

“I made mistakes I shouldn’t have made, that I wouldn’t usually make.”

“Still not your fault.”

“Then whose fault is it?”

“I dunno, the earthquake? This culture that doesn’t see the Ood as worth saving, so we wasted all that time up here arguing with that prick Toby? Anyone but the one person with a medical license who actually tried to help them?”

The Doctor nods, then pauses.

“What Toby said-“

Rose blanches. “I know you wouldn’t-“

“I’m so, so sorry I put you in a position to have them think you would do _that_ with _me_ ,” he pleads earnestly. “By claiming you as my- I swear, I only meant to protect you.”

“Doctor, wait. Do you think I was upset because it was _you_?”

“Well. Yes, of course,” he sniffs.

“Silly man,” Rose shakes her head tenderly. “I was upset because he called me a stupid whore in front of everyone, not because it was _you_.”

“Oh.”

“Doctor,” she offers, standing up and stepping towards him so she can run her hands down his arm to locate his own by touch alone, so she can lift them both to her lips and place gentle kisses on their backs. “You know any woman- or man- would be lucky to be with you like that.”

He makes a little choked sound, brown eyes baring into her wide and vulnerable as a deer.

“You’re a wonderful person,” she says, rubbing her thumbs over the knuckles. “Your nose is still bleeding, though. Let me get that.”

Leaving him for a moment to grab a clean handtowel and wet it under the sink, she comes back to gently wipe at the blood on his handsome face.

“Ow,” he whines boyishly as she reaches his nose.

“M’sorry. Does it feel broken?”

“Yes, it’s broken. Not to worry Rose Tyler,” he gives her a sad little grin. “My body heals fast.”

“Good,” she says. “Can I continue?”

“Yes ‘mam,” he retorts, a shadow of his usual cheek.

Rose gently rubs his lips and chin, before moving down to scrub at the rest of his body. First his neck and shoulders and chest, and then his arms, and then his hands, which are the worst by far. There’s blood even under his nails, and she has to scrub hard, putting her whole body into it. The water from the showerhead bounces off him and splatters over her, and soon she realises she’s gonna get soaking again. 

In that moment she sees the Doctor look down and then quickly flit his eyes back up towards the heavens.

Following where his gaze went, she remembers she’s wearing a white shirt and it’s now rather wet, and he had definitely just seen right through it to the rounds of her breasts and the points of her nipples. He’s always been a breast man, this version of him, and it’s not the first time she’s caught him looking- though it’s perhaps the most obvious.

This shirt was evidently a bad idea, or maybe getting in the shower with him was, because it’s also clinging to the silhouette of her waist and revealing the dark outline of her sex, and he may well have seen that too if he looked low enough. Though of course, being a breast man, he might have just stopped there.

They meet each other’s eyes again, and in that moment there’s nothing they can do to hide that they’ve noticed each other noticing.

“Rose, don’t look down,” he says honestly.

“Okay,” she swallows. “Want me to do your back?”

“Yes,” he chops. “Thank you.”

The Doctor turns around awkwardly, and she begins washing his back (which is mercifully cleaner, having been covered and turned away) before trying to knead the strain out of the tight muscles at the top of his shoulders. He tenses when she does so, before shooting a hand out to brace on the tiled wall and groaning deeply.

“How’s that?” she asks softly.

“Good, but…”

“But?”

“Kinda not helping me calm down, Rose,” he says. 

“Oh. Sorry.”

“No,” he moans. “Don’t be. They are sore… and it, and it-”

“Want me to keep going?”

He nods imperceptibly.

She continues working the muscles out of his shoulder, then moves lower into his lower back. Another hand shoots forward to brace against the tiles, too.

“Thank you- that’s,” he gasps, and Rose thinks he’s trying to tell her that it’s gone far enough between them and she’d reckons she’d better listen, even as she longs to reach down and stroke his erection until he falls apart in her hand, boneless and sated and better.

“Do you need to come?” she offers quietly, unable not to.

The Doctor freezes.

“No- um- thank you, that’s very kind but… I’m, I’m quite alright,” he stutters.

“Kay,” she murmurs, soaping up the handtowel again to give his back a final wash.

“You, um, you are beautiful, you know,” he says out of the corner of his eye. 

She chuckles nervously. “You’re just saying that cause my tits are wet and my hands are all over your body.”

He huffs a little laugh back at that. “No, no I’m not- I mean, that is-”

“It’s okay.”

“I mean really, you’re worth… and you are _so_ beautiful, and you were brilliant down there. Smart.”

“Oh,” she mumbles into his turned back. “So, you did hear, then. Thought so.”

“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t realise my communicator was on and I’m sorry but it’s just that I wouldn’t want you to think that you aren’t the smartest, and prettiest-“

“Don’t, don’t do that, Doctor… Don’t humour me.”

“I’m-I’m not. But-”

“Just stop, okay,” she says sharply. 

“Rose-“

“D’you want to do the rest,” she clears her throat, handing the cloth to him, “And I can get our towels?”

He nods sadly, head bowed against the tiles.

Rose strides out, closing the door to the shower stall behind her and trying not to think. Stripping off her wet shirt, she replaces it with the only thing on hand- a long, fluffy towel, wrapped around her body and tucked in under her arms. Come to think of it, she says to herself, the Doctor hasn’t even thought to bring a change of clothes with him, has he? _Silly_ man.

“You alright?” she calls to him. 

No answer.

“Can I come back in?” she knocks, pushing the stall open slowly when still he does not reply.

He’s slipped off again, staring blankly into the distance, the water streaming over his unmoving body like he’s a log in a river.

Afraid of spooking him, she reaches behind the Doctor slowly to turn off the shower. When he doesn’t react, she runs the towel over his body before gently wrapping it around his waist with a neat tuck.

“Come on,” she says, leading him back to their cabin by the hand.

Mercifully, he follows. 

Tucked into bed, they lie there side by side, staring at each other in the soft glow of the bedside light they’d discovered (after some time living on the base) handily pops out of the wall for a spot of night time reading.

“Why don’t you tell me a story, Rose?” he asks softly, head cradled in his left hand. 

“Okay,” she replies, thinking hard.

She doesn’t know any Ancient Greek literature; hasn’t got any books memorised in her head like he does. But she does have one story she can tell him.

“Once upon a time,” she starts, quietly. “There was a little girl who never got to do anything exciting, ever. Her Mum did hairdressing out of their flat during the day, so when it was the school holidays, she’d just be hanging ‘round the estate she’d spent her whole life on with nothing to do.”

He watches her intently, his still-wet brown hair dripping onto the pillow like a puppy dog fresh from an unwanted bath.

“There were these other kids on the estate she used to hang round with sometimes, and by the time she was twelve they’d all gotten these bikes they could nip about on. You know, riding around the estate, even going places outside the estate sometimes- all around London, it seemed to the girl.

“One of the kids was Mickey, who she knew cause her mum used to babysit him sometimes. He was fifteen and his nan had gotten him a bike ‘cause he got an apprenticeship that year down the mechanics, and when their mates were around he’d call her a baby and tell her she couldn’t hang round with them cause she didn’t have a bike. Even though sometimes when it was just them two, he’d let her to ride his, teaching her how to stay balanced.”

“Idiot,” the Doctor snorts softly at that.

“He _was_ being a prat, at that age. Think that was before he realised he wanted to sleep with me, so you know. Anyway, the girl begged her mum for a bike for Christmas like the other kids had. But her mum just said they didn’t have enough money for that, so the girl resigned herself to not having one.

“But then, when Christmas morning came, under the tree was this really fancy, red bike. The most beautiful bike the girl had ever seen. The tag on it just said ‘For Rose, From Father Christmas.’ Her mum thought it must have been her fella who bought it cause who else’d be able to get it in the flat overnight? But that never made no sense to the girl ‘cause he didn’t like kids and there was no way he’d bother to get her something so expensive and thoughtful and then not take credit.

“So it was a bit of a mystery, but that didn’t really matter none cause it was _so_ beautiful, and it was _hers_ , and she could go flying down the estate on it, go outside the estate on it. And it felt so fast with the wind whipping on her face that the girl liked to imagine that it was an aeroplane taking her off and flying her someplace else.”

“And then one day she met a magical man who really did take her flying off to so many different places, places that were _really_ someplace else, and a little while after that on a day that everyone lived she solved the mystery of who gave the red bike to her after all. Father Christmas indeed, the cheeky git.” 

He gives her a wane little smile.

Rose trails a finger down his right hand where it rests between them. “Why’d you do that for me, Doctor?”

He shrugs, unwilling or unable to articulate it.

“When, then?”

“After your father. The first time.”

“Oh.”

It suddenly all comes rushing out of him.

“Felt bad about what I did. You were asleep, and I wanted to do something to make it up to ‘ya even though I was too cowardly to apologise to you like I should have. Then I remembered you saying there was never much money for Christmas presents and you and Jackie didn’t have a car growing up. Reckoned you would have loved to be able to go places even back then, and you might have missed out on a bike from your Dad. In your culture, its usually the dads, right?”

“Maybe. I dunno. But it was nice. One of the nicest things anyone ever done for me. Cause you’re a good man- you always try and do good for people, always and that’s what matters.”

“I failed them.”

“No. Don’t think that.”

He brushes a chaste kiss of thanks upon her lips.

“Thank you.”

She brushes her lips back; it’s meant to be another chaste thank you, but he catches it and deepens it.

They kiss heatedly for some time, neither wanting to admit they’ve just crossed the line from the nominally friendly into the carnal. Lips move against lips; tongues delve into mouths. A hand reaches out to caress her cheek, to tuck a stray strand of hair behind the shell of her ear. A slow, methodical explorer is tracing every seam in her mouth, mapping every nerve ending, discovering exactly how she likes to be licked and sucked and grazed and rubbed.

The Doctor doesn’t make any attempt to push her further, but at the same time, doesn’t show any sign of letting up. Just kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her.

It’s the best kiss of her life.

Finally, she has to gently stop him, knowing she’s taking advantage of his black mood but not wanting to rebuff the poor man, whose lips are pouting back at her, red and swollen, as she feels hers must be too. Pulling him in to rest his head on the crook of her shoulder, Rose falls into unconsciousness, exhausted.

She wakes in the morning to find him humping her stomach in his sleep. He’s half on top of her, a big hand gripped tight around her left arm, holding her down. She tries to move out of his grip, but it only tightens.

Tries to say something, but her voice comes out soft and scratchy.

“Doctor, stop,” she’s finally able to enunciate clearly. 

But he just groans her name, picking up the pace with his hips and tightening his hold even further while his eyelids still flutter in sleep. It’s half-pleasure, and half-pain, now, and he’s going to be so angry at her when he wakes up but he’s grunting and growling in her ear like she always fantasised, and his cock feels so hard, and it looked so lovely and long yesterday…

His hips slip lower with a particularly brutal thrust and accidently brush between her legs and her cry echoes helpless around the room. That’s finally when the Doctor wakes, freezing on top of her before gasping raggedly. 

She screws her eyes shut and pretends to be asleep as he rolls off her body and onto his back with a thunk and exhales.

“Fuck,” she hears him swear coarsely beside her. “No.”

Rose’s heart sinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying this story and would like to read more!


	9. Rose in every thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wakes in the morning to find him humping her stomach in his sleep. He’s half on top of her, a big hand gripped tight around her left arm, holding her down. She tries to move out of his grip, but it only tightens.
> 
> Tries to say something, but her voice comes out soft and scratchy.
> 
> “Doctor, stop,” she’s finally able to enunciate clearly. 
> 
> But he just groans her name, picking up the pace with his hips and tightening his hold even further while his eyelids still flutter in sleep. It’s half-pleasure, and half-pain, now, and he’s going to be so angry at her when he wakes up but he’s grunting and growling in her ear like she always fantasised, and his cock feels so hard, and it looked so lovely and long yesterday…
> 
> His hips slip lower with a particularly brutal thrust and accidently brush between her legs and her cry echoes helpless around the room. That’s finally when the Doctor wakes, freezing on top of her before gasping raggedly. 
> 
> She screws her eyes shut and pretends to be asleep as he rolls off her body and onto his back with a thunk and exhales.
> 
> “Fuck,” she hears him swear coarsely beside her. “No.”
> 
> Rose’s heart sinks.

The Doctor is dreaming. The dream starts down there, underground, below Sanctuary Base Six amongst the blast-rock and dirt and blood as his clever brain replays fruitless attempt after fruitless attempt to save the injured Ood.

But then his last patient, the one who lives, wrestles his scalpel away again but instead of slashing out at the one who deserves it, leaps up and grabs Rose. Clamps her hands behind her back and holds her in front of him and slits her clean across her throat. 

“Killer of my kind,” the Ood accuses with the voice of an emperor as Rose’s lifeless body slumps to the ground like a ragdoll, and his dream-self screams and screams and screams.

Then the dream morphs and he’s stumbling through a fireplace, tripping over his own feet onto a dead metal spaceship where Rose is strapped to an operating table, her breasts jutting tantalisingly out like she’s nothing but a love-interest in a sci-fi B-movie.

He pulls out his sonic screwdriver with a flourish but he’s one second too late, and the clockwork droid slices her open from neck to pubic bone before his very eyes.

Watching as the droid excavates her heart and wires it into the ship, his medical knowledge providing exquisite detail of the desecration of her body, the Doctor’s dream-self is unable to run to her until the wicked deed is done.

There’s a letter inside her ribs that he picks out, and on it is her messy handwriting telling him that she waited for him forever, and that she’s sorry her forever wasn’t long enough. 

Dead eyes look glassily at him, accusing, and he wills himself to wake up.

But of course, he doesn’t; he’s the Doctor and he must play out this nightmare to the bitter end. So he tucks the letter back between her ribs and unwires her heart from the ship and seats it in the gaping cavity of her chest and sews her back up with trembling, bloody hands.

Rose Tyler gasps back to life like Frankenstein’s monster, but she’s still strapped by her hands and her ankles to that horrible metal bed.

“Why does it hurt?” she cries to him, struggling at her restraints.

“Come here,” he says, tenderly covering her body with his. “I think you need a Doctor.”

“My Doctor,” Rose sighs, naked and unchained, pliant and commanding; parting her thighs and drawing him inside her soft cunt like a benediction.

They make love slowly. They are naught but man and woman; husband and wife. Her pelvis undulates in perfect synchronicity with his thrusts. Her living eyes burn into his. There are iridescent tear tracks running down her cheeks, but he doesn’t think she’s sad. The pressure on his prick is wonderful, and his orgasm builds until he’s on a delightful precipice, raring to fill her with his come.

Then suddenly they are lying on a mossy bed in a green, green grotto with a waterfall spraying down from the heavens. Rose starts to wiggle out from under him like a slippery fish; like she’s longing to return to the water. But he won’t let her; he catches her, dragging her back beneath him and continuing to pump into the tight warmth she keeps between her legs as he stares at her wet, round breasts.

“Doctor, stop,” she hesitates, and starts to push at his chest, at his arms.

His hand moves to grip her right arm brutally and he hears himself growl like a beast as he holds her down and fucks her.

“Rose,” he groans.

And then she’s crying properly, her face screwed up and flushed pink and cowed.

He sees that there’s still blood all over his hands, and his chest, and he’s smeared it all across her naked body, too; there’s red streaks on her breasts and her belly and between her thighs where he’s still thrusting into her, and his cock is coated in it, and it’s mixing with the water and turning the pool the colour of wine…

“Rose?” his dream self asks, confused.

“You think I want you?” she cries, bucking, clawing at his arms, disgusted and fierce and afraid. “You stole me. You abandoned me. You trapped me here and you’re a killer and I could never, never-”

At that the Doctor is hurtled back into wakefulness to find himself on top of her in real life, too. He freezes, then gasps. Then leaps off of her as fast as he can.

“Fuck,” he swears. “No.”

Lying on his back, he pants heavily, running his hand through his hair; trembling, aroused, and horrified at what his dream-self had done. 

Disgusted, he realises his towel has come half undone in the night, and his erection is poking through it. Scowling at the unruly, vulgar thing, he fumbles to re-tuck the towel and cover his shame as had been drilled into him in the Academy.

He realises he needs to check on her but dreads looking, afraid of just how far his dream-self has taken it. Certainly, the dream was… graphic, in many ways. He’s no stranger to bad dreams, but that was- bad.

Blessedly, her towel is undisturbed, and her eyes are closed.

There’s no sign he molested her further.

Zealous eyes check and double check, but she’s fine and her towel is firmly in place and she’s sleeping and he hasn’t hurt her, so far as he can tell.

Still willing his erection to go down, he lies there, staring at the ceiling and self-flagellating. Thinking about how much he could have hurt her by letting his nightmare-prone body into her bed leads to thinking about how much he hates himself. Thinking about how much he hates himself leads to thinking about how he failed the day before. Thinking about how he failed the day before leads to thinking about what she said to Ida, and what she said to him…

And still he’d kissed her last night. Really kissed her. Damn it, she’d offered to give him a- what, a hand job, last night? Like it was some sort of service to the poor, distressed Time Lord. Like it would mean nothing. Like he’d shattered her self-esteem so much these past months that she’d offer him… that.

Like she was nothing.

When he’d only meant to puncture her heart a little bit, just enough to scare her off any romantic ideas she might possibly be developing about getting into a physical relationship with him. Ideas which were very dangerous for both her and him. 

But instead of a little puncture, easily patched over with an ex-boyfriend (though he’d always thought she deserved better) or a new conquest (though none of the men they ever met on their travels were good enough for her), he seemed to have cut her deep. So deep that she may have been slowly bleeding out for months without him noticing; so deep it may be too late to repair.

Because he’d tried, last night, in his clumsy, inept way and it hadn’t worked- she hadn’t wanted to hear it, or perhaps hadn’t been able to.

And then he’d gone and kissed her, and almost assaulted her in his sleep.

And still his stupid fucking cock is fucking hard. Fuck!

He’d better leave before she wakes, lest he traumatise her; and if he abandons their cabin, he can distract himself with some tasty breakfast treats in the cafeteria. It’s not him being cowardly; it’s him doing right. Dragging his donated pack closer to the bed, he awkwardly changes under the covers into any trousers he can find; the only thing left of his original clothing now is a Henley he wasn’t wearing by chance yesterday, and his trusty old converse.

The man in the bathroom mirror looks very small and very shabby indeed this morning.

But when he enters Habitat 3 there’s no food, and Ida’s standing there instead with crossed arms and a frown on her face.

She tells him that the Ood working in the kitchen have had to have been relocated to the drill to make up the numbers, and so he and Rose will be doing double duty for the foreseeable future.

The Doctor’s hopes of infiltration and TARDIS discovery (as well as tasty breakfast treats) are waning.

Much of his morning is spent fumbling at cooking while skittishly peering at Rose when she’s not looking, the heat and the horror of his dream flashing through in aberration when he catches the flash of her profile or the cream of her skin.

Rose herself is moody and glowery when she comes into the cafeteria and he tells her about the situation, and though he worries for a moment that perhaps she did awake this morning to find him abusing her (or is mad about his kisses the night before, also a real possibility), she only mumbles something under her breath which doesn’t make sense about him finally seeing what it’s like to be the dinner lady.

“Rose,” Danny comes into the kitchen after lunch, and envelops her in a big hug. “Thank you.”

She gives a surprised, happy little yelp and the Doctor lowers his gaze as if to give them privacy.

But of course, he’s eavesdropping, and he hears Danny prattle on about how great it was she made Zach let them go down there, that Zach is so cautious unlike Captain Walker, and that they’d never have recovered so much of the stock without her arguing his side.

“And you, Doctor,” Danny walks over to him, offering a handshake. “Thank you.”

The Doctor accepts reluctantly, not feeling deserving of it when he’d failed so utterly at the one thing he’d hoped once upon a time to have dedicated his life to, and not particularly wanting it from a human who regarded other living, thinking _beings_ as stock. Come to think of it, he’ll need to have a word with Rose about being doubly carefully not to let on any hint that he himself isn’t perhaps as human as the next man, just in case with these lot.

But Rose is beaming again, and that makes it worth it, and then after Danny trots off she turns that smile upon his own retched self.

“Story?” she asks, an olive branch.

“Let’s see, Rose Tyler,” he smiles, pleased to pick it up. “Where did we leave it?”

And then it comes to his clever brain- a way to tell her what he needs to tell her, to explain why he did what he did, without actually saying the terrible, awful, tellingly intimate and indomitably gauche words. While it may not change the way things have to be between them, she deserves her self-esteem back, even if that results in revealing more of the tarnish on his soul to her than he may be comfortable with. 

“I know!” he drawls, sticking a big, silly grin on his face. "Well, shortly after the old man delivered Pan’s message to Chloe and Daphnis, a gentleman from the city retires to his grand estate in the village.”

Rose hums in approval as she begins to clean up from lunch, rinsing dishes, and nodding at him to begin loading them into the dishwasher which she earlier dubbed ‘frighteningly futuristic,’ though he thinks she was probably just trying to help him feel useful after the disaster that was him and breakfast.

“This gentleman brings with him a lovely young wife, a lady of beauty and education named Lycaenium who is more refined than the country women. It’s a boring life in the sticks for a lively woman with an aging husband and no work to bother her, so she takes to spending her days staring out from the window of her grand estate. And this means that every morning, she watches Daphnis drive his goats to pasture and every evening, she watches him return, raptured by his youthly, hearty beauty.”

A little frown appears beneath Roses eyes, but she doesn’t say anything, just continues rinsing, eyes firmly focused on her task.

“She sets herself to win him over with pretty words, and presents, but it’s to no avail, and it’s then that Lycaenium begins to suspect he may be in love with that little shepherdess he’s so often seen driving the animals with.”

“Determined and clever, she decides to find out, setting to follow Chloe and Daphnis about their duties one day. She watches them drive their livestock through the pastures, and then sojourn to the Grove of the Nymphs, where, peering through the bushes, she learns the truth of their relationship. Lycaenium realises she has a two-fold opportunity to genuinely help them while at the same time satisfying her own desires.”

“M’ gonna start sweeping,” Rose interjects.

“What? Oh, yes- I’ll put these leftovers away,” the Doctor replies. “But anyway, the next day, Lycaenium leaves her estate early and sets herself under an oak which she knows Daphnis and Chloe will pass by. When she seems them, she pretends to swoon in great distress, falling into Daphnis’ arms. ‘An eagle has carried off my goose,’ she cries, ‘please go with me to save him, Daphnis, for I am afraid to go into the forest alone. Chloe can look after your goats while you do, as they know her so well.’”

“Daphnis, suspecting nothing of what was to come, gallantly follows Lycaenium into the forest. When they come to the very thickest part, still with no goose, she brings him to a halt. ‘Daphnis,’ Lycaenium says, ‘You are in love with Chloe; the nymphs revealed this to me in a dream last night, and bade me relieve you of your trouble by teaching you the mysteries of love. For you see, as a married woman I know that these consist not in kisses and embraces alone, but in connection far more delightful.’ Daphnis, tortured by his inability to consummate Chloe, cannot contain himself with joy, and throws himself at Lycaenium’s feet and begs her to teach him the act.”

“But he can’t!” Rose says suddenly, passionately; the words barrelling out of her chest.

The Doctor gives her a shrug and a grin. “Lycaenium, well-practiced in the ways of love, sees now that he’s more naïve than she originally thought, and begins to instruct him very simply. She bids him lie down by her side and kiss and embrace her as he is accustomed to kissing Chloe. When she finds him inflamed with desire, she lifts him up a little and slips under him, and sets him on the road he had sought so long in vain. And thus is Daphnis initiated.”

“That’s horrible,” Rose says, scowling.

“Why?”

“How could he do that to Chloe, after everything?”

“But it’s all _about_ Chloe, the encounter.”

“Oh yeah,” Rose snorts. “Sounds like it.”

“Not all cultures have such rigid views of monogamy, Rose.”

“No,” she says, looking down at the sweeping she’s doing, as if counting the very specs of dirt. “When you’re in love with someone, you only want to be with them.”

“You’re very young, Rose. Maybe it’s Lycaenium whose getting her heart broken in this situation, hmm?” he prompts, hoping her quick, empathetic mind would be able to make the connection.

Because he’s trying to make her understand that all he did with Reinette was about Rose herself, all along. That he did what he did because he was trying to get Rose out of his own head with a comely distraction, and trying to get him out of hers.

Reinette wasn’t a repudiation of her but a flattery to Rose’s own beautifulness and cleverness and goodness and joviality and general ability to take a drowning creature and rebuild him into an approximation of a man again.

And that then he’d realised at the end of it that he’d made Reinette, a worldly, clever, sexually-experienced woman who used love as currency _actually_ fall in love with him, when every biographical detail had her as the least likely woman in the universe to do so. When the history books taught that she’d been raised since the age of nine to love the King and the King alone, and had truly done so. When he’d barely thought about her at all beyond a little stroking of his ego and a fun mystery to solve and an _opportunity_.

Rose was in every one of their exchanges.

But she doesn’t take his story that way, evidently.

“No, she isn’t,” she says, fierce and certain. “She saw him a few times from afar and wanted him because she thought he was pretty. She didn’t know him enough to get her heart broken. Maybe it’s you whose never been in love, Doctor.”

The declaration knocks the wind out of him. As much as he'd once hoped she’d think that; he’s surprised by how badly now he wants to protest the truth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think of the Doctor's attempt to tell the truth? How will Rose react? 
> 
> Please leave comments and kudos if you are enjoying reading this story!


	10. Miscreant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose was in every one of their exchanges.
> 
> But she doesn’t take his story that way, evidently.
> 
> “No, she isn’t,” she says, fierce and certain. “She saw him a few times from afar and wanted him because she thought he was pretty. She didn’t know him enough to get her heart broken. Maybe it’s you whose never been in love, Doctor.”
> 
> The declaration knocks the wind out of him. As much as he'd once hoped she’d think that; he’s surprised by how badly now he wants to protest the truth.

They barely speak for the rest of the day.

Shortly after their ill-fated conversation, Rose decides to tell him she can manage the rest of the days’ laundry and kitchen work. When she was wiping down the tables, she says to him, she overheard the crew discussing how vexed they’ve been trying to recalibrate the fallen drill. He’d be better off going and doing something more aligned with his skillset, and leave the simple stuff to her- and besides, isn’t he meant to be on TARDIS-related infiltration and reconnaissance?

Most she just really can’t stand to be around him right now, not when he’s just been so… disappointing.

He gives her a pathetic little nod like a kicked puppy, and so she spends the rest of her day running herself ragged between the laundry and the kitchen. Clothes and bedsheets for the whole base, dinner, and clean up- it’s too much physically for one person, really. And it doesn’t help that the whole time she’s parsing different versions of whatever stupid cryptic meaning he was trying to communicate to her with that story around her head.

Try as she might, she can’t come to any conclusion other than that he thinks of monogamy and love very differently to her and was trying to tell her so. And it hurts.

She wants to scream; she wants to cry. She feels so stupid and disgusted and afraid and in love, still. She takes her anger out on the dishes, instead; pours her frustration into really whacking the wet clothes down into the dryer.

All in all, Rose is exhausted by the time she’s finished. It’s late at night, well past Ravel’s Bolero o’clock. She can barely drag herself out of the hot, steady heat of the shower. And that’s when she realises, she’s forgotten to get a fresh change of clothes.

There’s nothing for it. She wraps a towel around herself to return to their cabin like they did together the night before, tucking it in at her chest. She’s adjusting it in the mirror when she sees the big, purpling bruise on her arm from the Doctor’s overactive wet dream.

It looks horrible; it looks like how her heart feels.

He’ll completely freak out if he sees it, of course. Hell, if Ida sees it, she’ll have another reason to separate Rose from the Doctor, and despite everything Rose still doesn’t want that. So she tries to wrap another towel around her shoulders like a shawl, in case he’s still awake when she gets in, or if there’s anyone she walks past in the hallway- not that there should be, this late at night.

Of course, Toby is leaving his cabin just at the right time. 

“Looking good, Rose,” Toby calls out just after she brushes past, and his voice echoes down the hallway.

She turns to tell him off, but stops suddenly upon seeing that his eyes are the colour of primary red.

They quickly blink back to blue, and a sudden rush of fear washes over Toby’s face.

“Rose, what just happened?” he asks, by all indications genuinely confused. 

She walks cautiously towards him. “Are you alright?”

But Toby just looks at her, befuddled, and starts to wobble. Before he can come crashing down to the floor, Rose leaps forward to catch him by the arms. He stumbles heavily against her, one hand falling to her waist and the other grasping at the swell of her hip.

Meanwhile, inside their cabin, the Doctor’s superior hearing has heard every lascivious note in Toby’s earlier catcall. 

He comes barrelling out of their room, thundering down the maze of hallway, hearts thumping erratically in his chest, desperate to find Toby before it’s too late and protect Rose.

But when he turns that final corner, instead of his angry companion gearing up to give the miscreant a good talking to, the Doctor sees a barely dressed Rose with Toby’s hands all over her like an octopus. There’s a tender look on her face towards the boy, that the Doctor doesn’t want to believe means what it looks like.

“Get your hands off _my wife_ ,” he snarls, pushing Toby against the wall. “You don’t touch her, you don’t speak to her like that, ever again.”

The boy cowers.

“Doctor, don’t.”

A gentle hand is pressing on his shoulder. The Doctor turns to her, adrenaline pumping through his veins. 

“Let him go, you’re scaring him,” her soft, large eyes plead.

He recoils from the both of them. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” he scowls, grabbing her by the arm to haul her toward their cabin. “Get inside.”

Rose gasps as he pulls at her.

“What?” he asks, but she shakes her head.

Over her shoulder, he sees Toby grinning at him strangely.

Incensed further by whatever the boy is trying to imply, he practically drags Rose down the hallway and into their cabin, slamming the door shut and shoving her against the wall to interrogate her about whatever the hell he just interrupted.

His head is a mess of hormones, full of anger at her repudiation of his feelings for her today, confusion from her cold shoulder; shamed arousal at the way she’d let him kiss her last night, at the way she’d offered to do things to him in the shower that would be _beyond_ a formal declaration of courtship in his culture, even though he knows it means nothing in hers, even though he doesn’t want her to know what it would mean to him…

And then to see her, tender and intimate, with anyone else, let alone the boy who’d spoken so disrespectfully to her… he feels disgust, betrayal, jealousy; a whole lot of emotions that he doesn’t have a right to feel because she isn’t really _his_ , but he feels them anyway.

But then he realises- her face is screwed up in pain.

“What’s wrong, Rose?” he demands, backing up a step.

“Nothing,” she says, head bowed. 

“Then why, pray tell, when I _told_ _you to be careful_ , are you are walking around half-naked in the hallway and cosying up to Toby of all people?” he spits in distaste, pacing the small room like a caged lion.

“I wasn’t,” she stumbles to explain, hurt. “It’s just, he said something, and his eyes-“

A tender look; pretty eyes. Hands groping her body. A plea to let his rival go. The Doctor snaps.

“In case I haven’t made it clear. We’re in a dangerous situation, here, so it’d be helpful if you could _try_ to stop acting _quite_ so friendly.”

Rose crumples. “Is that really what you think of me?”

“What should I think, hmm? Really though, isn’t letting Toby touch you up a bit desperate, after what he said to you? And then there’s Danny, hell, you even let me in your bed,” he rambles, barely noticing the hot tears that are sliding properly down her face now. “Never mind what you offered to do to me in the shower. Does intimacy mean nothing to you, Rose?”

“Fuck you,” she cries, distraught. “You’re the one who likes to hop beds, not me.”

“Don’t be so stupid!” he sneers, realising she hadn’t understood his story today at all; unable to help but grasp her by the arms again as if to shake some sense into her.

But she cries out sharply the moment he makes contact.

The Doctor releases her, shocked.

Her reaction doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t place an ounce of pressure that would hurt a human on her. And there’s a towel wrapped around her shoulders for no logical reason, he thinks, eyeing it distrustfully.

“Don’t-“ she says, but he rips it off anyway.

A large, hand-shaped bruise is blemishing her upper arm.

“Is that nothing, is it?” he says icily.

“Yes, no-”

“Which is it, hmm? Is Toby harassing you, Rose?”

The Doctor sees her pause.

“Tell me,” he commands.

“You know,” she says shakily, angrily, “It’s not easy to _tell_ you things, when you’re yelling at me.”

“It is _my_ responsibility to keep you safe, so when I ask you to tell me something _you_ _tell me._ ”

“Since when did you even care?”

“I care! Obviously, I care!” he thunders. “So tell me!”

“He didn’t _hurt_ me but there was one time- he said some things – in his room.”

“What were you doing in his room alone?!”

“Our job, when you were off doing something more important, your Lordship.”

“I told you, you aren’t allowed-“

“In case you haven’t realised, you’re not my boss, or my father!”

“I might as well be, for all you bloody listen!”

She snorts, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Oh, you think that’s funny, do you? That boy is obsessed with you. So let me tell you in small, simple terms even _you_ might be able to understand. When Chloe rejects Dorcon, he doesn’t just give up.”

“Stop it,” Rose warns.

“He captures the wolf and skins it’s body and makes himself a wolf suit, so he can lie in wait for Chloe one night.”

“Stop ruining it, stop ruining the story,” she shrieks hysterically, pulling at her hair. “It was supposed to be something nice between us!”

The Doctor looks at her arm and imagines what happened. Toby’s hand around her tender, pale flesh; Rose trying to pull away…

“God, you’re naïve enough to let him do that to you and you won’t even admit it.”

“The bruise is from you, Doctor,” Rose says firmly, finally. “You held me down, this morning, remember?”

“No,” he says, knowing the truth of her words as he does.

“Yes,” she smiles, and it’s cruel, animal, wolfish. “Feeling a little desperate yourself, Doctor? Desperate enough to try slumming it with me?”

“Why didn’t you attempt to stop me?” he splutters, grasping; defensive.

“I did, actually, ta. That’s how I got the bruise.”

“I wouldn’t…”

“You would, it’s the admitting that you won’t do. What I think is funny, yeah, is you pretending you could be my father, like I don’t wake up with your hard on pressed into my backside every morning.”

The Doctor runs.

About face, through the doorway, down the hall, round the corner, round the next one… he runs and runs and runs.

Then suddenly, another about face. Quickly coming to his senses, the Doctor realises he’s just done the thing he said he wouldn’t do. Left a defenceless Rose alone and vulnerable in a bedroom that doesn’t lock, after her pursuer just leered at her and groped her.

He runs back down the hallway towards her, imagining Toby slipping into her room, into her bed, hurting her. Brutalising her.

Mercifully, the door is shut, and though he is still too much the coward to open it, he presses his ear against it and can’t hear anything but the sound of Rose softly weeping.

Because of him, not because of the rustle of some intruder.

The Doctor slides to the ground, laying himself upon the hard threshold of the cabin door to guard her through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What has the Doctor done? What has Rose done? Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying this story!


	11. Remorse, reconciliation, confession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mercifully, the door is shut, and though he is still too much the coward to open it, he presses his ear against it and can’t hear anything but the sound of Rose softly weeping.
> 
> Because of him, not because of the rustle of some intruder.
> 
> The Doctor slides to the ground, laying himself upon the hard threshold of the cabin door to guard her through the night.

He must have fallen asleep on the threshold of their cabin, because he’s jolted awake by Ida’s voice.

“Doctor, what in heaven’s name are you doing down there?”

“Ah…“ he fumbles, searching for an explanation.

“Fighting with the missus?” she asks with a strangely sceptical tone.

“Something like that,” he admits sheepishly. 

  
“Well, fix it. Apologise to Rose, whatever it is you’ve done. You can’t sleep out here- it’s against regulation.”

“I don’t know if I can, this time.”

Ida raises an eyebrow. “Funny, because _I_ don’t think there’s much she wouldn’t forgive. She’s quite your little defender, that one. Should hear the things she says when you’re not around- ‘Ida, give him a chance- he’s the best man I’ve ever known.’”

“What I said to her tonight was indefensible.”

“Then tell her that.”

“Hold on, wait a minute, when weren’t you going to give me a chance?”

“Perhaps when I found out you’d been lying to me about being married to her.”

He cowers, trying to shrink into the ground. 

“Go on, then,” Ida nods towards the cabin door as she stalks off down the hallway. “Say you’re sorry.”

Thus told, and wanting to anyway, the Doctor tries to work up his nerve to knock on the door. But like usual, Rose is braver than him.

The door opens behind his back, making him scramble to spin back on his bum. 

“Doctor?” she asks sadly, standing in the doorway dressed in that long, white men’s shirt that tortured him in the shower, eyes red rimmed and weepy, obviously not having been sleeping.

A vision.

“Rose,” he breathes, stumbling to his knees. 

“Heard you talking,” she murmurs down at him, brushing shyly at her fringe. 

“Yes, just Ida catching me acting like a dolt. May I come in?” he asks hesitantly.

She nods, and steps back to allow him in; he swings the door firmly closed behind him, and steps towards her.

And then they become but two magnets, mutually drawn forward to wrap the other in a tight, comforting hug.

Rose in his arms; him in hers. It always makes things better.

“I’m sorry for what I said. And did,” he mumbles into her crown, brushing his thumb like a feather over her shirt where he remembers it to be.

“Sorry I said those things too,” Rose mumbles back, stroking the rough hair at the base of his head. 

“We’ve always been good at knowing what to say to hurt each other, haven’t we?”

“That’s ‘cause we know each other so well, I reckon.”

The Doctor release her and gives her a tight, sad smile.

“Will you come to bed?” she asks as he backs away.

“Oh. Umm, I don’t know if that’s a good idea…”

“Please, Doctor,” she pleads, eyes wide and bewitching.

“Okay,” he says, unable to resist; intending firmly to control himself by not falling back to sleep. 

Chucks are slipped off; his Henley and a spare pair of trousers remain on. She’s all angelic sweetness as she pulls back the covers and lays down on the far pillow, swamped by the white shirt and tear-scrubbed free of makeup. He joins her, slipping his skinny body into the left side of the bed; untouching, but so much closer than he deserves.

“You’re all I have, now,” she says as he turns his head on the pillow towards her. “I don’t want to make you angry with me.”

“Oh, Rose,” he croons, heart breaking. “I’m not angry with you. I’m just worried about you. On more than one front.”

She nods seriously, as if she’s really thinking about his words.

“You know that- in the hallway, I honestly wasn’t, with Toby.”

“Why don’t you tell me what _did_ happen then, hmm?” he asks gently. “Before I jumped to unfair conclusions.”

Rose bites her lip. “He did say something rude. But then he looked… confused, and scared like… like he didn’t know what he just said or how he got there. And then he started to fall to the ground, so I tried to help him- that’s all.”

“Of course you did,” the Doctor sighs.

“And I know it seems stupid, but...”

“You aren’t stupid, so tell me.”

“Would help if you weren’t lobbing it at my face, all the time."

“I know. And I’m wrong to do that, and it isn’t what I actually think of you. So please, Rose, be more generous than I have a right to ask and tell me what you were going to say.”

“I swear his eyes flashed bright red for a second.”

“Flashed _bright_ _red_? As in, bloodshot, like they were irritated in the sclera? That’s the whites of the eye, Rose.”

“No, like they were really bright red. Like he was wearing red contact lenses, in the coloured part of the eye.”

“In the Iris. _Bright red_ in the Iris? Hmm… that’s, well- I don’t know what that might be, but it sounds like a problem. A strange virus they disturbed drilling, perhaps, causing bouts of ill-temper, uncontrollability?”

She nods quietly. “You believe me then?”

“Always. When I’m not… mad with jealousy,” he admits.

She blushes prettily.

“Think I might know how that feels.”

He swallows.

“Doctor, can I ask you something?”

"Anything, Rose Tyler,” he breathes, nervous though she makes him. 

“You said… when you were angry, doesn’t intimacy mean anything to me. Like it did mean something to you. But then earlier today, you said not all cultures were monogamous, like I was silly for thinking sex meant anything. I just- I don’t really understand.”

He tugs on his earlobe. “The story doesn’t… map… perfectly. My mistake. It-physical intimacy, intercourse- it does means something in my culture. To me.”

“Then what _did_ you mean, by that story?”

“That I, that I… don’t want you to think I… did what I did because… I don’t c-care for you. Or that you aren’t… pleasing to me.”

“Okay,” she accepts, reaching out to stroke his sideburn soothingly. “Thank you for telling me that. I know it’s hard for you to talk about.”

He gives her a tight nod. “Can I- can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she rushes, surprised.

“Did I- did I hurt you?” he asks, nodding to her arm, tears budding in his eyes.

Rose weighs up her options carefully. “My arm- it does hurt, a little. But I knew you were asleep, the whole time. You didn’t do it on purpose, and when you woke you stopped right away. I was more worried- I felt guilty, that you- you know?”

He doesn’t know.

He’s always felt very lost, very out of his depth, with her and the confusing emotions she’s always germinated in him. Even more so, now, stranded on Krop Tor.

“If I had the TARDIS, I’d have some cream to heal it. But I don’t.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’m worried I’ll do it again, if we continue sharing this bed. I’ve been having these… vivid nightmares, after the war.”

“I know,” she says tenderly.

“I wish there was something I could do.”

“You could- kiss it better?” she asks, all hesitance and hope.

It’s delightfully coy. His eyes darken.

Slowly, slowly, with all the air of a practiced lothario and the confidence of an entirely other man, he slips the top button loose on her shirt and brushes the right side open just enough to be able to bend his head and place his lips softly upon her bruise.

“Better?” he glances up from her skin.

“Yeah,” she nods breathily, eyes caught.

“Good,” he growls, unable to stop himself from lowering his lips again to her creamy, exposed flesh and kissing a line up her shoulder and over her clavicle and up again along her neck. Wet kisses become licks; licks become deep, hard sucks, until Rose is panting and squirming beside him.

Her shirt is still mostly buttoned, but he imagines that if he slipped his fingers through one of those gaps between the lower buttons, or ran a hand teasingly up her thigh, or even lifted the whole thing over her hips to expose her, he’d find that her body has started producing enough lubrication to ready his way. And he’s pretty sure that in this moment she’d let him slide his long fingers inside her and stroke her soft cunt until she comes, and maybe even replace it after with his cock.

And at that, the Doctor decides he’d better stop this dangerous line of thought and action.

He places a final peck upon her jaw before falling onto his back beside her and breathing deeply. Beside him, through the corner of his eye, he can see the rise and fall of her chest as she does the same.

It doesn't help. 

“Doctor, can I ask you something else?” she says when she recovers her voice.

“Of course,” he replies, still gravelly with lust.

“Can you hold me? Please?”

“Rose-” he warns.

“Please, Doctor. Just this once. I’m-I’m scared, and I feel so alone, all the time.”

“I don’t feel myself here, either,” he replies, wrapping his arms around her back and whispering the words into her ear, a confessional. “I feel so out of control.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose says.

“Who am I, Rose, if I can’t get us back to her?” he asks, stroking her back.

“You’re still the Doctor. You’re always the Doctor.”

“I don’t know that I am. Living out my days, linearly, in the human empire, with not a scrap of anything to my name- it’ll be an ignominious final end to my race, that. They’d be turning in their graves, the Council. Mind you, they’d probably tell you that this was a pretty predictably Doctor-shaped cock up- so maybe I am the Doctor after all.”

“Well, I’m here, no matter who you are.”

“S’kind,” he mumbles, ducking his head.

“I mean it.”

“How long?”

“Forever.”

They kiss, intimate and warm.

“Rose… does Ida know, that we aren’t really…?”

“Oh, god,” Rose says. “Sorry. I should’ve told you. She just kinda guessed, based on something I didn't say. I didn’t mean to. And I didn’t mean not to tell you. But you were so upset, that night, and then we fought.”

“Oh, well,” he grins, goofy and good natured. “What’s one more crew member against us?”

“She’s not- she’s not against us. She said she’d think about the right thing to do.”

The Doctor looks at her fondly, and decides to snog the daft, apologetic look off her face.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss some more, wrapped up in each other, in their bed, in a flat-packed base on an impossible planet orbiting a remarkably dangerous black hole.

Surprisingly, she doesn’t try and push him further that night like he’s found over the years that humans are want to do, tender little ephemeral things that they are. And he’s able to resist his baser nature. And so he tells himself that maybe they can just have this.

This comfort, between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think about the progress the Doctor and Rose are making? Please comment and leave kudos if you'd like more of this story.


	12. Joy, date, pain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor looks at her fondly, and decides to snog the daft, apologetic look off her face.
> 
> They kiss, and kiss, and kiss some more, wrapped up in each other, in their bed, in a flat-packed base on an impossible planet orbiting a remarkably dangerous black hole.
> 
> Surprisingly, she doesn’t try and push him further that night like he’s found over the years that humans are want to do, tender little ephemeral things that they are. And he’s able to resist his baser nature. And so he tells himself that maybe they can just have this.
> 
> This comfort, between them.

Their next week on Sanctuary Base 6 is spent stealing kisses between work. Tender kisses, sprawled out in their bed after a long, hard day. Slow and methodical kisses, cocooned together in the closet of the laundry room between loads of washing. Playful kisses, with Rose’s bum on the kitchen counter and the Doctor’s hands grasping her waist and his hips pressed between her legs. Anytime they get a moment alone.

Rose feels like her body is practically humming with happiness. That first night after their fight, the Doctor balks at getting back into bed, afraid of manhandling her in his sleep again if he has another bad dream. But when Rose teases that she wouldn’t mind if he did, so long as he kissed it better again, he just blushes and quietly slips in behind her, tucking her pelvis into his. And that’s the end of that.

Another night, he gleefully bounces onto the bed beside her with a tablet computer in hand to show her what he’s been working on with the crew. He’s like a proud little boy, all geeky glasses and mismatched clothes and hair sticking up all over the place; pleased not only with his work but also with the fact that they now seem to like him enough to bring the computer back to their cabin.

The TARDIS should have fallen approximately here, the Doctor tells her, pointing at the screen. The problem, he explains, is that the base is so under resourced that they can’t spare even a jot of energy to divert the drill from its predetermined path to find the TARDIS. So, if he can boost the drill’s energy source with a bit of Time Lord science, once the crew has hit where they’re meant to be going, there’ll still be plenty of power left for him to take it for a drive to the right while they are busy inspecting the artefacts down below anyway.

And he’s pretty sure he’s nearly got the Time Lord science part of it worked out, too.

“That’s great!” Rose cries joyously. “I knew you could figure it out, didn’t I? I’m so proud of you. My brilliant man.”

“And that’s not all,” he says, a little more shyly, peering at her through his glasses. “Now don’t take this as me giving up on finding her, mind, but I’ve also been doing some reading up on the human empire in this time period- you know, history, politics, geography, that kind of thing.”

He flicks across to another screen on the tablet.

“I know you don’t have time to read, but I found some audiobooks you could listen to while you work, maybe,” he continues, pulling out another little device with something that looks like headphones. “So you can get to know a bit more about their culture, and not feel so out of place, just in case.”

“Oh, Doctor,” she cries, grasping him into a tight hug. “Thank you.”

“You are ever welcome, Rose Tyler,” he smiles with warm, crinkly eyes, popping out the vowels of her name.

Among the volumes he’s carefully selected for her, Rose finds, there’s a ‘History of the Discovery and Enslavement of the Ood,’ released by Friends of the Ood, which she listens to first.

Over dinner, which he spends with her in the kitchen snagging nibbles off her tray between helping her serving people, she excitedly talks to him about it. Turns out that humanity discovered the Ood a few hundred years ago on the moon of a ringed planet located in the Horsehead Nebula, and there’s a big operation still there breeding and exporting them out across the three galaxies that she now knows make up the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. And maybe, she suggests to the Doctor, when they get the TARDIS back, they can go and check it out.

He beams at her, a real toothy, Doctor-y grin, as if he’s proud of her too, before apologising that he needs to duck quickly back to the control room to keep working that he’s sorry he can’t help her clean up.

And when she’s sore and tired and limping back to their room after to get her change of clothes for the shower, he’s waiting there eagerly for her in bed. And when he sees that her shoulders are stiff, he throws the tablet to the side and begs her to let him massage them better before she trots off again. 

Rose sits on the edge of the mattress and he scootches forward till his legs are wrapped around hers, and then the Doctor begins expertly kneading her tender muscles, rattling off the correct anatomical terms as he goes.

“Mmm, Doctor,” she sighs, not a bit theatrically. “You’re so good at that. Your hands…”

He huffs a little awkward, self-conscious laugh, but she can feel his prick hardening against her back. She leans into the massage, lolling her head back, and lets her cheek rest against his for a moment. Twin hearts try to lull her into laying there forever.

Rose moans that she has to go and leave his talented hands to have a shower, asking softly through heavy lids if he wants to join her.

But he just blushes and mumbles something about that surely being against regulation.

Alone in the shower, Rose touches herself imagining what could have happened if he did say yes; disappointed, but certain he’ll make a proper move soon.

That Friday night, Rose does however have a success in managing to convince him to join her in another way.

Against his better judgement, the Doctor finds himself agreeing to drink to the point of slight intoxication. Nothing he can’t metabolise quickly in the advent of danger, but enough to make him tipsy and sloppy and eager.

It’s the twinkle in her eyes that does it as she turns to him, flushed and pretty and oh so close, and whispers huskily in his ear to go on and have a proper drink for once, before quickly downing her own with a cute little pulled face.

At some point during the night Rose ends up sitting on his lap.

A brave thumb reaches out to stroke the soft flesh of her inner thigh.

Rose melts back into his arms like a boozy kitten.

She’s tossing banter back and forth with the crew from her perch, loud and bright, and he loses himself in the listening. Even finds himself feeling comfortable enough to join her and the other humans in their friendly jousting, from time to time. She’s radiant, his Rose. He’s so proud to be with her, that night and always.

“Is this what it’s like?” he whispers to her, giddy and low. “Going on a real, human-y date with you?”

“Spose,” Rose ducks her head, then glances slyly at him out of the corner of her eye. “Bit boring?”

“No,” he says seriously, tilting her chin to brush a soft kiss across her lips in front of _everyone._

It’s worth it, for the way Rose beams at him afterwards.

The night gets more and more raucous as it goes on.

Eventually, Scooti suggests a drinking game.

Danny suggests spin the bottle.

“Absolutely not,” chimes the Doctor, squeezing Rose’s waist. “What? You know I don’t share.”

And at that Rose whips around to snog him possessively, one hand wrapped around his back and the other gripping him hard by the hair to guide his head; all cheap liquor and hormones and fizzling, dizzying sensation.

“I don’t either,” she purrs.

“You never have,” he says significantly.

Roses eyes widen in what he can only but read as pleasurable surprise.

“Oh, the happy couple,” Danny sneers from across the table good naturedly.

“Get a room, you too,” adds Scooti.

“You know what?” the Doctor declares, lifting her up effortlessly into a lively bridal carry with an unusual display of strength. “Think we might.”

Rose squeals as the crew hoot and holler at them.

“Didn’t know that skinny bloke had it in him,” Zach snarks to Ida. “Bloody superhuman.”

“Oi,” the Doctor yelps over his shoulder.

“You’d be surprised!” Rose calls with a laugh. 

“You’d be surprised?” he echoes back at her when they get to their cabin, depositing her on the bed. “You’d be surprised? You cheeky girl. What happened to hiding the alien, hmm?”

“Mmm, hiding the alien,” she teases. “Sounds filthy.”

“Oh, that’s it,” he huffs, grabbing her hands and pinning them down so he can place a long lick on the tip of her nose.

“Eww!” she laughs hysterically, pushing back at him to free her hands. “You creep!”

“Your creep,” he smiles, slobbering across her cheek. 

They wrestle, tipsy and playful until suddenly it isn’t. 

“So,” she murmurs, bold and supine. “What happens next, between Chloe and Daphnis?”

“Hmm?” he hums distractedly from in between nibbles to her neck.

Rose pulls him up by the hair again to kiss him deeply, then looks back up into his eyes, catching him in her gaze. Her black lashes flutter seductively. A flush of alcohol paints prettily across her cheeks, and her full lips are bee-stung and pouting.

“I mean, now that Daphnis has lost his virginity to that older woman, he knows what to do with Chloe, yeah?” she purrs, nipping at his bottom lip and reaching down to stroke his erection through his pants. “What she wants. How to give it to her.” 

“Ah. I see. Um, I’m afraid that’s not quite it,” he replies sheepishly, stopping her hand with a kiss to her knuckles to soften the blow. “You see, Lycaenium’s still jealous. So she gives Daphnis a parting half-truth after their _lesson_.”

“Oh?”

“Yes- she tells him that the first time Chloe will cry and bleed as if wounded in battle.”

“Oh.”

  
“And he can’t stand the thought of ever hurting her,” the Doctor continues, looking meaningfully into her eyes. “If he unleashes the force of his passion on her. He’d rather never have her, than hurt her. They can have this- the kisses, the embraces. But consummation…”

Rose swallows. “I see.”

The Doctor flops back down onto his back beside her. When he chances a glance back, her face is all tight, dead control.

“Does he ever change his mind?” she asks after a little while.

The Doctors mouth flaps open wordlessly.

“Best get some rest, Rose,” he finally replies, with regret.

Rose curls up on her side away from him, and the scent of alcohol-tinged saline hits the air. He longs to comfort her, but knows he’s far too inadequate a man to do so. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment and review if you are enjoying this story - I'd love to hear what you all think!


	13. Metaphors and stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And he can’t stand the thought of ever hurting her,” the Doctor continues, looking meaningfully into her eyes. “If he unleashes the force of his passion on her. He’d rather never have her, than hurt her. They can have this- the kisses, the embraces. But consummation…”
> 
> Rose swallows. “I see.”
> 
> The Doctor flops back down onto his back beside her. When he chances a glance back, her face is all tight, dead control.
> 
> “Does he ever change his mind?” she asks after a little while.
> 
> The Doctors mouth flaps open wordlessly.
> 
> “Best get some rest, Rose,” he finally replies, with regret.
> 
> Rose curls up on her side away from him, and the scent of alcohol-tinged saline hits the air. He longs to comfort her, but knows he’s far too inadequate a man to do so.

Rose doesn’t punish him, for what happened between them that night.

She continues to be kind, and caring; in other words, she continues to be her usual empathetic self towards him. She even continues to let him kiss her, though he doesn’t dare do it with an ounce of their usual passion, and he can see the hurt working behind her eyes when he does. And he hates himself, as always.

A few nights later, he rocks up to the cafeteria after a long day chipping away at the energy problem in the control room, only to find Danny working in Rose’s place.

“What happened to her?” he rushes, horrified.

“Relax,” Danny says, dropping a ladle into the vat of Protein Six so he can hold up his hands in defence. “Rose _just_ said she wasn’t feeling well. She was looking a bit faint and shaky when I came in to eat, so I offered to take over from her. She’s back in your cabin lying down.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor says to Danny, quick and genuine, as he turns on his feet to run after her.

Rose is sitting on the bed, not lying down, as he bursts in the door. 

She looks surprised to see him, and sad, and shaken, and at the same time as if she’s trying to hide all those things from his piercing assessment of her person. 

“Are you alright?” he entreats, wild-eyed and panting.

“Oh, Doctor,” she chuckles, soft and wane. “I’m fine. He said he wouldn’t say anything to you…”

The Doctor falls to the bed beside her and wraps her in a tight embrace.

“Don’t do that to me,” he says when he pulls back, two large hands staying to clasp her cheeks. “And please don’t hide things.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she says, leaning into his right palm. 

“But Danny said you were unwell,” he pleads. 

“I’m really okay, I’m not sick, I just- I got a bit of a shock. It’s nothing worth telling.”

“You got a bit of a shock,” he repeats, thinking. “Tell me. Please Rose, tell me.”

“It sounds stupid.”

“Which as we’ve established, you’re not. So please, please tell me, sweetheart.”

Roses blushes a little, and he realises he’s never called her that before in anything other than his own head. 

“It’s just- I was listening to this audiobook, right. And suddenly, it was like the track changed, and I got the strangest message. This deep voice, saying awful things.”

“What did it say?”

Rose shakes her head, reluctant. “I can’t- it was just, bad.”

He searches her face, mind whirling at what could be so bad that she can’t give voice to it. Nevertheless, he won’t push her.

“Toby has access to all the comms,” he says instead. “Could he be playing a trick on you, perhaps?”

“Maybe. It did kinda sound like someone deliberately lowering their voice. You thought any more, about the illness angle?”

“I’ve been doing some research. But… no, nothing yet. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m just so glad you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” she says, brushing a tender kiss of comfort against his lips.

He accepts it gratefully, though he knows he should be the one comforting her. 

And then he deepens it, the kiss growing in passion between them, until he’s pushing her down against the mattress and pressing a trail of pecks down her neck, down her collarbone, down to the soft swell of her breasts. He licks a line around the half-moon of her right breast, while a trembling hand reaches up to brush over her left; gentle at first, before building into a deep massage and pinching at her nipple. Rose sighs softly beneath him.

When he reaches to pull her shirt down to expose her nipple to his tongue, she stops him with a firm hand over his.

“So, let me get this straight,” she asks as evenly as she can, while obviously trying to recover her breath. “In the story. Daphnis won’t deign to actually _be_ with Chloe. But he does want to keep kissing her, and touching her up, whenever he feels like it?”

The Doctor quickly rolls off of her and onto his back, staring hard at the ceiling. 

“Actually, he tries to avoid her for a summer, knowing he’ll be hard pressed to resist temptation.”

“Not because he doesn’t want her, but because that woman tells him he’ll hurt her, if they’re intimate, and he believes that to be true.”

“Yes.”

“Doctor… have you ever taken anyone’s virginity, like that?”

Surprised by the turn the conversation took, certain she was going somewhere elsewhere with it, he stutters out an honest response.

“Yes, once… with my… wife.”

“You were married?”

He nods, chin jutting stubbornly out.

“What was it like?”

“Awful. Arranged marriage.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago now.”

“Did she… die?”

“Did I kill her, do you mean?” he replies sharply, shooting her a hard glare and a raised eyebrow.

“No,” Rose says softly, and he can sense she’s telling the truth.

“Sorry,” he bites out guiltily, running a hand through his hair. 

“S’okay.”

They are silent for a moment.

“But she wasn’t your first?” Rose continues, brave as ever.

“No- we weren’t supposed to, but… there was this… friend I had, in the Academy. We’d grown up together, and it just sorta- happened.”

“Was it better with her?”

“Him.”

“Oh.”

“That alright?” he says lightly, hoping she can’t see how important it is to him.

“Yeah, of course it is,” she says tenderly, turning onto her side to face him.

His eyes sweep over her expression; find nothing but the same compassion that’s in her voice in the subtle crook of her lips, the slight line on her forehead, the warmth burning from her eyes. Suddenly, he actually _wants_ to keep being honest. Wants to unburden his soul to her, like he’s never done before, and have her respond with more of that compassion, like he’s never deserved.

“And no, it wasn’t,” he picks up the thread. “We had a… difficult relationship, for many years.”

She places a gentle kiss on his shoulder, curling her body around him.

“And he hurt you physically, or emotionally- or you hurt him…?”

“In a manner of speaking. Him hurting me, physically, emotionally… me trying to save him… and he’d say I was hurting him, by doing that, I suppose.”

“I see.”

“And what about you, Rose?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you,” he pokes at her shoulder. “You’re curious today. Got any dark shadows in your past relationships?”

“I’m always curious,” she says looking up at him, tongue in her teeth. “S’what you like about me.”

“One thing,” he says, wagging a finger in front of her nose. “But go on. No deflecting. If I have to answer, so do you.”

“You did answer me, didn’t you?” Rose looks at him speculatively. “Well, okay then. There’s not much to tell. First there was Jimmy. Dropped out of school for him, but when I moved into his flat, I found out he’d completely played me and was actually after a live-in maid and a bank account and, and… a punching bag.”

“Ah,” the Doctor says, muscles tensing, a red wave of rage crashing across the craggy shore of his mind. 

“Then you know Mickey,” she rushes to continue. “He was safe, but he was always more of a mate, you know?”

“Yeah. You deserve…”

“I want-“ Rose clears her throat. “How do you think Chloe feels, about Daphnis never giving in to what’s between them?”

He gives her a sour look. “I imagine she feels- hurt, frustrated. Confused. But that doesn’t mean… he’s not doing right by her, in the long run. He knows he’ll hurt her, so he resists what he actually wants- do you understand?”

“I understand- I understand he thinks… he’s doing what’s right. But I don’t actually get… metaphorically, that is… how sleeping with her would be different to kissing her and holding her...”

“Metaphorically… Chloe is unmarried and female, and so must remain innocent and intact in an Ancient Greek pastoral idyll lest her halo fall. And actually… sex is a whole other level of intimacy; a whole other level of knowing someone, of vulnerability, of exposure to pain.”

“So it’s not… physical pain, then. I mean, he doesn’t have like a barb that comes out down there, or something.”

“This isn’t one of Captain Jack’s bodice rippers, Rose,” he blushes deeply, thinking of the joy their friend had taken in sharing those 51st century romance novels with her.

They’d be sat in the galley over breakfast, or dinner, and Jack would be distributing a novel of the week and telling them both he was introducing her to a wider variety of humanoid sexuality beyond what she’d learnt from her unfairly sheltered early-21st century upbringing. An educational project. To Jack, their girl may as well have been born in the Victorian-era. Rose had soaked up the books with genuine curiosity, and his last self had scowled at the Captain and told him to stop corrupting her, mildly afraid of what she might learn but also secretly curious about her reaction.

Those were happy times, for them all.

“Thought maybe it might’ve been, for a bit there,” she grins wryly.

“No,” he sniffs, mildly insulted. “All’s… perfectly normal.”

“It’s a metaphor for emotional hurt, then,” Rose rejoints, astute as ever. “Not just to her, but to him.”

“Emotional hurt to them both. Physical, from the danger he’d tempt from the universe by claiming her. Y’know, Ancient Greece,” he tugs on his earlobe nervously. “There are pirates, marauders, men in wolves clothing, all that. But the bottom line is, with the knowledge he has - he can see maybe a short slip of happiness, and then pain, all around.” 

“But maybe… a life without pain isn’t a life actually lived- even if it’s the kind of pain that makes it shorter.”

“Sometimes… life is very long and very painful and you just need to do everything you can to avoid incurring more.”

“I thought better of you,” Rose says honestly. “You taught me that, you know. To live.”

He looks at her, distraught.

“Really though, Doctor. I’m not saying it has to be me, but you deserve to be with someone. And I’m here, and I wouldn’t ask too much, and I’d be good to you, if you let me.”

“Too good.”

“What if you’re wrong about that? No, seriously,” she says to his look. “What if you’re not the monster you think you are?”

“I know you think that. Really, I know- it flatters my ego to be around someone who thinks of me like that. But there’s so many people I’ve hurt over the centuries, Rose. I don’t want to add you to the long list, any more than I already have by stealing you from your timeline.”

“You didn’t _steal_ me. I chose to come with you!”

“You only think that. You don’t understand the implications of the differences between us. How my people would have viewed my interference in your life. How often I’ve manipulated you.”

She shakes her head. “You’re wrong. I’m never gonna be as smart as you. But I know how I want to live my life. And I know how I feel about you. And I just keep thinking… if I died, not being able to show you, what you mean to me…”

“But you do show me,” he gushes. “You show me so much more kindness than I ever thought I’d experience.”

“I’m not trying to push you into something you don’t want, Doctor. But I also need you to know, that I do want more, if you do too. Even if you think it’ll hurt me, I still want it. I want to know you, as intimately as you’ll let me, and I want you to know me. I want us to live, for the short time that we have together.”

“I had hoped this would be enough for you.” 

“Is this enough for _you_?”

He scoffs.

Rose chooses her next words carefully. “You’ve… given me more than I thought I’d ever have. And if this is all you want, just tell me the truth- I’ll find a way to deal, I don’t know how just yet, but I will. I’ll always be your friend.”

The Doctor looks at her in genuine surprise, and she notices.

“Are you, are you worried I won’t be your friend, anymore, if you don’t… kiss me, and touch me, and that?”

“No!”

“Cause you know, that’s never gonna happen,” she soothes, reaching up to stroke the fringe out of his eyes. “You don’t have to do something you don’t want. ‘M never gonna leave you.”

A pained, animal sound finds its way out of the back of his throat. “I told you, it’s not a question of _want._ ”

“I’m just trying to say to you… you know what _I_ want. In my head, I’m _yours_ , Doctor, regardless. Never gonna change. However you want- okay, _choose_ to be with me. And if you’re not ready yet for more, that’s okay. And if it’ll never happen, that’s your choice, too, but I think I also deserve to know, yeah? In proper words, that anyone could understand, not in metaphors and stories.”

“You deserve the universe.”

“I just want to know… where the lines are. What we can have, and what we can’t have. Can you understand that?”

“Yes, Rose. I can understand that. Let me think about it,” he says softly, kissing her crown, in a voice that makes Rose feel unbearably sad. “Let me think about whether I can bear the pain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think of the Doctor's reasoning, and Rose's? And just what did Captain Jack teach her?
> 
> Please comment and leave kudos if you'd like more of this story!


	14. Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pained, animal sound finds its way out of the back of his throat. “I told you, it’s not a question of want.”
> 
> “I’m just trying to say to you… you know what I want. In my head, I’m yours, Doctor, regardless. Never gonna change. However you want- okay, choose to be with me. And if you’re not ready yet for more, that’s okay. And if it’ll never happen, that’s your choice, too, but I think I also deserve to know, yeah? In proper words, that anyone could understand, not in metaphors and stories.”
> 
> “You deserve the universe.”
> 
> “I just want to know… where the lines are. What we can have, and what we can’t have. Can you understand that?”
> 
> “Yes, Rose. I can understand that. Let me think about it,” he says softly, kissing her crown, in a voice that makes Rose feel unbearably sad. “Let me think about whether I can bear the pain.”

The Doctor is apologetically absent over the next few days, caught up in trying to boost the drill’s power source, which he tells her is proving more problematic than he hoped without access to his own technology. Rose spends long hours working by herself, wondering if he’s using it as an excuse to avoid making a decision, or if he’s made his decision and the thing he’s actually trying to avoid is the part where he tells her, and then chastising herself for thinking so poorly of him.

Feeling those thoughts a betrayal, even though by most available indicators he’s probably going to make a decision that will break her heart.

The one benefit of working in the kitchen is that it does give you the chance to people watch without anyone really noticing. Not like the laundry, where you’re locked in a small room by yourself. You stand at the cafeteria counter, like you’re supposed to, waiting to serve someone; all the while every person your world has narrowed to at the moment gathers in front of your watchful eyes three times a day.

What’s more, they gather _with_ each other. Habitat 3 is the only social setting the base has, really. So you get to observe how they interact, too.

Handy when you and your mate slash potential-something-else, potential-never-anything-else suspect there may be a virus causing mood swings, ill-temper and malice loose on the base.

One lunch, while doing just this, Rose sees something truly suspicious (and downright awful, too).

She strides purposefully towards where the Doctor is sitting with Ida and Zach, making a show of bussing his tray while meaningfully touching at his arm as she does so.

“Doctor,” she asks softly, leaning down. “Can I talk to you in the laundry for a bit, this afternoon?”

“But, Rose…” he whines, eyeing his companions, until she squeezes his arm harder with a pointed look. “Umm. Yup, course you can.”

“Looks like you’re in trouble with the missus, mate,” she hears Zach sing as she walks back to the counter.

“Is that right, Doctor?” Ida adds dryly. “Fighting with the wife again?”

Ida obviously isn’t happy with the Doctor’s continued obfuscation, a fact which Rose is sure continues to frighten and alarm him greatly. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get a chance to hear his response.

By mid-afternoon, the man in question is ducking his head nervously into the laundry room.

“Come in, Doctor,” she chuckles. “You aren’t _really_ in trouble with the missus.”

All the tension leaves his body as he sashays in.

“What’s wrong with you?” she guffaws. “Unlikely to get into a marital with you when I’m _not_ _actually_ _your wife_ , Doctor.”

The Doctor’s eyes flitter closed like shutters.

“Oh, think you might have told me off once or twice before all the same,” he replies evenly, but there’s a strange note in his voice she can’t quite place.

“I just need to tell you something I saw,” she explains, pointedly putting on a few of the laundry machines to drown out their conversation.

“What is it?” he asks quietly, leaning closer; all intense brown eyes and wonderfully expressive eyebrows and gorgeous freckles and inquisition.

“So. Well. When you’re working in the kitchen, you can see everything, yeah? And no one really notices you cause you’re just some girl that works in a kitchen.”

The Doctor swallows, and there’s an emotion Rose does recognise- contrition.

“So I’ve been watching people. Trying to figure out if anyone else is getting sick, or how the illness might be operating.”

“Course you have,” he beams, his entire expression transformed in an instant. “You’re brilliant.”

Rose lets the heat rise unchecked in her cheeks, and although she’s unable to meet the warmth of his gaze for a few long seconds, bravely barrels on with the pointy end of her point. 

“But today, yeah, I saw something else happen... or maybe something more of the same.”

“What did Toby do?” the Doctor asks gravely, his sharp mind making the connection without her even having to really say.

“Scooti’s there having lunch by herself, right,” Rose sighs, rubbing at her arm. “And Toby sits down next to her, real close, and she don’t look happy.” 

“You think he’s victimising her, too.”

“Yeah,” Rose confirms. “They talked for a bit. And then I saw him put his hand on her leg, under the table. And then she stormed off.”

The Doctor’s lips harden into a thin line.

“You need to try and talk to her,” he instructs. “Woman to woman. Find out more about what’s been happening. That doesn’t sound like the first time, from how you just described it.”

“Yeah, I’ll try, of course I will. But maybe you could too? She’d trust you.”

“Why would she trust me?” he asks, genuinely perplexed.

“Doctor,” Rose rolls her eyes. “Come on.”

“What?”

“You’re a handsome man. You’ve always had a way with women. Collected them as long as I’ve known you.”

He flinches, looking so genuinely hurt that she wants to take it back. But on another level, she really doesn’t.

“Say I accept that… characterisation, of myself,” he says evenly. “And I don’t know that I do. She does _think_ I’m married to you, as you’ve so helpfully been pointing out.”

Rose shrugs sullenly, fiddling at the controls on one of the washers. “Don’t matter none to some women, does it?”

“Scooti’s your age, and… having the same experience you are with a… serial harasser, apparently. I would have thought you of all people would have empathised with her,” he summates haughtily, every inch the superior Time Lord.

“I do! God, I’m just saying. You could- I dunno. Let’s not fight again, Doctor. Haven’t we had enough?”

“Let’s not fight,” he agrees, forcing his expression to relax. “Thank you for telling me, and for keeping up the investigation, Watson. Now I’ve gotta get back to my work. Will you be alright, by yourself?”

“Yeah, course. Just quickly though, while you’re here- got something for you.”

“ _You’ve_ got something for _me_?” he asks while she ferrets around in a basket, as if the idea of anyone giving him a present is patently absurd. 

Rose comes out with his newly mended pinstriped suit and places it in his hands.

Mending the damage caused to it by the medical emergency they responded to under the base has been her passion project lately, in between those gruelling days in the kitchen and laundry, and those stolen, exhilarating, confusing interludes in his arms. She’s gotten the blood well enough out of the brown fabric, using some futuristic chemical cleaner she found hidden in one of the draws, although unfortunately his lighter dress shirt ended up being a lost cause. And then she’d stitched up the slashes through his jacket made by the poor, frightened Ood lashing out in self-defence with his dropped scalpel.

It’s not good as new, but it’s a semblance of his trademark pinstripes, again. 

“Rose, what’s this?” he asks, staring at them.

“I fixed your suit.” 

“When. Why?” he stumbles out.

“Whenever I could between work,” she smiles indulgently. “And because… because you asked recently, who you are. And I thought this might help remind you. You’re the Doctor. And now you’ve got back the suit to prove it.”

He gapes.

“Go on then, say something,” she stutters, starting to feel nervous.

But instead of saying anything he sweeps her into a searing kiss, hands clutching desperately at her waist and cheek; snatching the nervousness right out of her. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs against her mouth, before kissing her again. “Thank you.”

Rose melts into his strong arms, stomach swooping dangerously, and it feels a lot like that time he’d swung her over his knee as they’d danced to Glen Miller around the console, full of joy and play and bravado. 

Thrillingly, he pulls her closer; gratifyingly, his desire begins to stir against her stomach.

Rough fingers entangle in her hair, and she feels her arms break out in a rash of goosebumps. 

Insistent lips are pushing her mouth open further, pushing his tongue in deeper…

“Cupboard?” she breaks the kiss to murmur at him, and he nods in agreement, heavy lidded and dumb.

Rose grabs him by the hand to lead the way, but she’s only moved a step before he pulls her back by the hips, smothering the side of her face in kisses and pressing his erection into her bottom, as if he cannot bear their bodies to be parted for even a moment.

“I want to touch you,” he mutters into her ear while guiding her stumblingly forward towards the privacy of the linen cupboard like she’s naught but his marionette, with his hands on her waist and his pelvis against her hips.

“Yes,” she gasps her desperate approval of the idea.

Those large, delicate surgeon’s hands shoot up to cup her breasts, kneading firmly as they stumble together some more until he’s got her inside the cupboard and braced against the wall, her two hands splayed flat and her bottom tilted back and her legs being wheedled apart by one of his.

“Can I keep going?” he grunts, teasing his hands lower. “Can I touch you down here?”

Rose nods emphatically and he dexterously undoes the zip of her pants and slips a hand into her knickers. They moan in unison.

Panting against her back, he begins to roughly massage her lips, tugging experimentally as if testing their tensile strength before splitting them with two long fingers and gliding luxuriantly through her wetness. Another moan of appreciation is pressed into her crown.

And then he brings those fingers up to run firm, sure circles around her clit.

“Doctor,” she cries in pleasure, tilting her head back so her neck is bared to him.

For the Doctor, it’s enough to make him snap.

The sign of submission, the sigh of her voice, his chosen name on her lips and the feeling of her womanhood in his hand and her round bottom against his erection… he loses control and pushes her into the wall with his hips, one hand bracing on the wall and the other trapped in her knickers still, and starts thrusting heavily against her.

Delicate pads of fingers turn into the blunt of his palm as he loses himself in pleasure and his massaging gets sloppier.

“Too much pressure,” she moans, overwhelmed.

The Doctor releases her with a heavy exhale and spins her around by the hips so she’s facing him. Her back hits the wall with a thunk as he gives her an appraising once-over, deciding to switch to rubbing her through the material of her knickers instead.

Rose’s mouth opens adorably inro a shocked mewl at the first glance of his thumb this way. The Doctor keeps at it, watching her reaction to this new kind of touch with intent curiosity. Trousers are soon pushed down to give better access, and fingers are added, but he thinks now he has it right for her.

“Better?” he asks hoarsely. 

“Yeah,” she sighs, head falling back.

He kisses her again, and resumes chasing his own pleasure. It starts with him rubbing his erection slowly against her thigh while his fingers work at her cunt.

Before he knows it, his hands are braced against the wall on either side of her head and he’s rubbing his prick directly onto her clit through her knickers while she whimpers quietly. 

“Can you come like this?” he gasps, desperate. 

“I don’t- I don’t know,” she replies, eyes wide. 

“Because- because- I think I can.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Rose screws up her eyes and hides behind her hair.

“Beauty,” he says at the movement, reaching up to tilt her chin back towards him. “Don’t look away.”

But she gives him a hurt look at that.

“What?” he asks, genuinely unknowing. 

“M’not,” she whispers, embarrassed.

As if it should be obvious.

Her meaning falls on him like a house of bricks.

“Oh, my Rose,” he gushes, sliding that palm back up to cup her cheek. “If only you know how long I’ve wanted to call you beauty somewhere other than inside my own head.”

Cautious brown eyes flick to his again.

“Don’t you believe me, sweetheart?”

“You never say- not, hardly ever,” she justifies. “Maybe twice, all this time I known you.”

“Not for lack of thinking it. Not for lack of yearning to be someone who could whisper it to you… to be a lover to you.”

“Then why…?”

“It’s easy to say….” he pants, continuing to thrust against her. “When it’s just a friendly word to a mate. But with you… I feel like I’d say it, and the whole universe would see- would see… my feelings for you.”

“Am I really not just a mate, then?” she coaxes shyly, thawing; a cheeky tongue even daring to slide out between her teeth.

“No, not _just_ a mate,” his lips quirk back, before turning serious again. “Rose. My Chloe, my Fortuna. My friend, and my home. Let me see you break. Do that for me, sweetheart.”

“I’m close, I’m, I’m- don’t stop,” Rose pants, beginning to become insensate. “Oh, god, please don’t stop.”

“There you are, beauty,” he whispers, watching her; awed and honoured as she comes apart in his arms with a final gasp of his name. “Let go, Rose. I’ve got you.”

He watches every warm, intimate moment of her orgasm, loving the goosebumps her arms break out into and the drop of sweat that runs down her cleavage and the way her skin blanches before flushing, and how she bites down so hard on her lips that she’ll leave a bruise.

When she blearily tries to refocus her eyes, he gives her another little smile and then readjust his cock to hit her stomach instead, leaning forward to salve her lip better with his tongue while he rubs himself off.

Soon he’s thrusting and grunting against her like an animal, while she tenderly strokes his back and neck.

“You looked so good,” he murmurs disjointedly as he approaches his peak, quiet as a mouse. “You were so wet, inside.”

“Still am,” she huffs, with a bawdy little laugh, dragging his hand back down her knickers to cop a feel.

The Doctor whimpers a little as he runs his fingers through her soft folds again, gathering the moisture that’s pooling there like he’d always imagined it’d be in all of his deepest fantasies. 

“Wetter even, yeah?” her eyes quirk. “Since you made me...”

He groans deeply as her bawdy mouth combines with the information his fingers are sending him. “Oh, fuck. You want me. You really want me.”

“Course I do,” she says softly, continuing to stroke his body. “You know that.”

It’s Rose’s turn now to watch, enraptured, as the Doctor gasps heavily against her, the cords of his neck straining as he empties himself with four messy gushes into the inside of his trousers, before slumping still.

And then he starts to laugh, happy and joyous. 

“That felt amazing,” he says, grabbing a towel to wipe up. “Good thing I’ve got my pinstripes to change into.”

“I can’t believe we did that,” Rose laughs back, sounding a little more shocked. 

“Oooh,” the Doctor coos, lifting her up with some surprising reserve of strength and spinning her around in his arms. “I just want to take you to bed and never let you leave.” 

“You’ve- you do want to, then?” her eyes widen as he puts her back down.

“I- yes, if you still want.”

“I still want- But… what made you decide…?”

“I decided… it was because… I’m still the Doctor. Or I still want to be, anyway. And the man who chose that name, would’ve chosen to take the pain, for the immensurate happiness you give me.”

Rose can’t help but scrutinize him deeply at that. He must sense his explanation is not quite enough, because he continues.

“And about me hurting you. Well, I can’t say the thought doesn’t still fill me with fear. But, you were right- it’s your life, and your mind. As long as you promise that you’ll let me keep you as safe as I can,” he implores, grabbing both her hands in his. “That you won’t keep things from me, that you’ll try and help me minimise the hurt you experience at my hands, as much as possible. Physically _and_ emotionally.”

“I know you’ll always do your best, to keep me safe,” Rose replies, squeezing back. “And, despite what you might say, I don’t actually go around trying to be jeopardy friendly. And I know you don’t go around meaning to hurt me.”

“Do you promise me that you’ll try, then?” he asks, very serious.

“Promise.”

“Then,” he smiles, playfully lifting her right hand and placing upon it a courtly kiss. “Tonight?”

“Yeah,” she smiles back, chuffed.

And his grin widens, just as chuffed.

“Oh, and Rose,” he winks cheekily from the doorway as he turns to exit. “That’s Time Lord stamina. If you were wondering.”

Rose blushes intently at his retreating form. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on the Doctor and Rose's relationship progression? Rose's gift? The Doctor's response? 
> 
> Please comment and leave kudos if you are enjoying this story!


	15. Gussy, tremble, peacock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "...As long as you promise that you’ll let me keep you as safe as I can,” he implores, grabbing both her hands in his. “That you won’t keep things from me, that you’ll try and help me minimise the hurt you experience at my hands, as much as possible. Physically and emotionally.”
> 
> “I know you’ll always do your best, to keep me safe,” Rose replies, squeezing back. “And, despite what you might say, I don’t actually go around trying to be jeopardy friendly. And I know you don’t go around meaning to hurt me.”
> 
> “Do you promise me that you’ll try, then?” he asks, very serious.
> 
> “Promise.”
> 
> “Then,” he smiles, playfully lifting her right hand and placing upon it a courtly kiss. “Tonight?”
> 
> “Yeah,” she smiles back, chuffed.
> 
> And his grin widens, just as chuffed.
> 
> “Oh, and Rose,” he winks cheekily from the doorway as he turns to exit. “That’s Time Lord stamina. If you were wondering.”
> 
> Rose blushes intently at his retreating form.

He comes to her that night dressed in his pinstripes and a shy, bashful grin.

She’s been sitting on their bed twiddling her thumbs, bathed and waiting and nervous, but the moment he turns that grin on her she can’t help but echo it back.

  
And seeing him in his old uniform after so long is a balm to her tired, frightened soul.

The Doctor closes the distance between them, scooting down to sit next to her on the bed, and takes her hand in his with a little huff of nervous laughter.

His thumb strokes her thumb back and forth, and that shy little smile he’s wearing spreads further as he gazes down at her, affection as clear on his face as the day is long on Sanctuary Base Six.

Well, not that the day is _really_ long. He’s taken her to many places that orbit a wider path around their star, or no path at all, and here the crew actually perfectly artificially control time to a standard human day with the careful application of Ravel. But it feels really long to Rose, doing the work of more than two, work which is physical and monotonous and usually apart from the Doctor and not particularly respected by anyone at all.

But he’s here now, and he’s gazing affectionately down at her, and she thinks she sees his eyes slip briefly down to her lips before flicking back up, and earlier today they did something unabashedly intimate and satisfying and wonderful and he said some lovely things and she still can’t quite believe that now she’s actually seen what the Doctor looks like when he comes.

Less believable still, he’d told her he wanted to sleep with her. Tonight.

And not just tonight.

It’s a lot.

The Doctor leans imperceptibly towards her.

“Did you get to speak to Scooti?” Rose clears her throat to ask, trying to find confidence in the familiar.

“What? Oh. Ah, ah, no,” he replies sheepishly, running a hand through his hair. “Sorry. Got all tangled up this evening- with the drill, that is, had a bit of a breakthrough.”

“But that’s great, Doctor.”

“Yup,” he pops. “Should be done, very, soon.”

“You’ve been having such problems, though.”

“What can I say? Someone must have inspired me.”

Rose blushes hotly, ducking her head to hide her upturned lips. 

“Did _you_ speak to her?” he enquires.

“Oh, no,” Rose says remorsefully. “She didn’t come to dinner, and then after I wanted to…well-”

His grin gets even wider. “You wanted to run back and get all gussied up for me.”

“Umm, yeah,” she ducks her head again, embarrassed not only by the bare truth of his words but also the delight in his eyes.

“Well, it worked,” he says simply, swinging their hands back and forth between them. “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

“Nervous?” he asks kindly. 

“Yeah,” she admits breathlessly.

“Come here,” he says, tucking her hair delicately behind her ear and leaning in to kissing her sweetly.

Rose kisses him back, all tongue and teeth. Their noses bump together awkwardly, and he repositions her head with a firm hand threaded through her hair.

“How tender are her lips,” he whispers fondly between kisses. “Tenderer than roses.”

Another brush of his lips against hers, another drawing back. Yet he’s still so close she can count every gorgeous freckle on his sweet, dear face.

“Yet I dare not kiss her,” he murmurs, as he continues to bely his own words. “Her kiss pricks me to the heart, and maddens me.”

“From the story?” Rose asks distractedly when he draws back again, voice thick.

“Yes,” he smiles into her lips.

The Doctor’s kisses grow more ardent; the hand guiding her head firmer. She feels him clumsily reach down with the other to unbutton his pinstriped jacket, struggling inelegantly before tossing it to the floor with a triumphant, muffled cry.

Rose groans in response, pressing closer to him. Delighted by his boyish joy; the granular reduction of space between them. He always feels smaller without his jacket, skinny thing prone to layers and layers and layers that he’s always been (both in this incarnation and the last) and it makes him seem more vulnerable, somehow. But not in a bad way. Like he’s _allowing_ himself to be vulnerable with her.

Before she can get used to the new sensations, he’s stripping off the next layer.

He has to break their kiss to peel his Henley over his shoulders, but when he does it reveals an expanse of pale, naked skin to her hungry gaze.

Rose stares and stares.

The Doctor gives her a knowing little smirk.

“Touch me,” he suggests, with a little quirk of his lips.

She reaches hesitantly up to brush her hands over his pectorals, feeling the hard spring of muscle and the soft silk of skin and the coarse tickle of thick, brown hair and the strange double heartbeats of his strange, double hearts.

_The more to love you with,_ an odd thought of an old story echoes through her mind.

But her hands move on. They travel down the centre of his chest and feel his abdomen tense before glancing back up his sides and playing across his ribcage like a xylophone.

“Somethings different,” she frowns.

“Yup,” a tight voice responds. “Extra ribs, there.”

“Oh,” she says, brushing her hands back up to slip daringly over his nipples.

He grunts a little as she does so, deep and masculine, and Rose promptly loses her nerve and attempts to move her hands to the relative safety of his shoulders. But he gasps as if in pain when they land there, and she quickly pulls them back.

“Nerve cluster,” he rasps through clenched teeth. “Left shoulder.”

“Sorry,” Rose stutters.

“That’s okay. Weren’t to know.” he smiles, grabbing her hands in his and placing them back upon his nipples. “Now, when you press here…”

Rose nods timidly as he manipulates her fingers into rubbing them back and forth. She can hear his breathing getting heavy and jagged and chances a glance down at his lap. There’s a rather impressive pop tent he’s pitching in there.

He kisses her again and when her eyes slide shut, she feels him reaching for the top button of her shirt.

It slides undone.

A second button is threaded through.

Cool air hits her chest and she can feel her breasts about to be exposed to his perusal.

But suddenly he stops.

“You _are_ trembling,” he remarks. “You’re more than nervous.”

“No, m’fine,” she says quickly , trying to reassure him; hoping not to discourage him.

The Doctor only looks at her appraisingly, before releasing her shirt and moving back.

“Don’t leave-“ she cries despondently, before realising he’s pulling the bedclothes back and sliding down against the mattress and reaching out with a quirk of his brow to pull her down with him.

“Oh,” she says, as he slots his lips firmly back against hers.

“There. Now it’s just us, kissing, in our cabin, like we have been doing,” he soothes as they lay side by side, lips meeting then parting again and again. “This can just be all we do, tonight. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

“But I _do_ want. It’s just that…”

“What, Rose?” he encourages softly.

“Doctor, I’m not, I’m not… that… _experienced_. I don’t know anything about your anatomy. I don’t know where to put my hands; I don’t have any clever words to say to seduce you...”

He turns that sharp, appraising intellect on her again.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he murmurs, stroking the curve of her cheek.

She nods.

“I’m nervous too,” he says.

Rose can’t help but screw up her face in disbelief at that.

“I am!” he protests. “This is still the man who was so embarrassed when you woke up with my, _well_ \- pushing into your backside, remember? You’re a beautiful young woman and I’ve lived most of my centuries playing the ascetic.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means... I’m not really the alien lothario you might be expecting from one of Captain Jack’s stories. Sure, I might have some physiological advantages on you. Bit of stamina,” he winks cheekily, before becoming serious again. “But really, most of those things in those books I know from so long travelling the universe talking to people and reading and learning new things, not actually _trying_ them. They would have been considered perversions in my culture, and it’s been hard to… shake that, over the years.”

“You’re trying to say you’re more like Daphnis, yeah?" she teases lightly, tongue between her teeth. "Before that woman showed him the way?” 

“Perhaps not quite so inept. I mean, I do know where to put it.”

“Doctor!” Rose gasps with a scandalised laugh, pushing playfully at his chest.

“You started it,” he responds, pulling her back in to him with a strong arm around the small of her back. “But I _am_ saying, you’d be wrong, if you think I’m not worried about being able to seduce you. Pleasure you… please you…”

“You will. You did, earlier. _Really_ did. And even if you didn’t… I just want to be with you.”

“And I you. Do you see, Rose?”

“Yeah,” she nods seriously.

“Then will you undo my trousers, sweetheart?” he asks, before gesturing to her shirt. “And let me unwrap these gorgeous beauties, and the rest of your heavenly body?”

"Don't know that you'll find anything heavenly," Rose shrugs wryly, reaching for his clasp. "But alright."

"Why don't we let me be the judge of your divinity?" he smiles, soft and sly. "After all, I once painstakingly carved every inch of your curves into a block of marble meant to represent the goddess Fortuna. And I did it quite well." 

"Mmm, but, you've never seen me naked, have you?"

"Trying to rectify that, actually," he volleys back, voice increasingly tight, as Rose slowly drags his zipper down tooth by tooth. "Trying pretty hard."

"I can tell," Rose hums appreciatively, as she finally reveals him strained and wanting against a tight, red pair of briefs; an obscene wet patch is spreading from centre right. "Now this, _this_ is divine."

The Doctor moans, tearing at her buttons like a man possessed. 

Just as eagerly Rose pushes his pinstripes further down his hips, desperate to reveal even more.

While she’s uncovering his small, pert arse, he’s working her shirt all the way undone, peeling it open to reveal her full breasts to his fervent eyes.

Then he's sighing heavily before allowing himself to reach out to play with them.

The Doctor’s practically gawping, Rose realises, as if he’s really, _really_ enjoying watching his hands manipulate them. Enjoying cupping and squeezing and pinching her nipples to points. Enjoying the shapes he can make, the contortions he can pull. Not so different from a human man, then.

She slips her hands around his bottom in return and they both whimper.

They get more and more desperate to undress each other; he helps her kicks his trousers down his ankles, and she helps him push her oversized shirt through her arms.

She expects him to reach straight for her knickers, next; instead, to her surprise, he flips her around and spoons her.

From this position, his large hands wrap back around her and rub every bit of unclothed skin they can reach, until her nerves are humming with pleasure. The gentle press of his still-clothed erection against her bottom reminds her of so many sleepy, shy mornings waking up sharing a bed with him.

It’s comfort, and warmth, and she wonders how he knew it was just what she needed. 

Finally, finally, he hooks his fingers into the sides of her panties and drags them down; then she hears the rustle of his own and gasps at the jolt of finally feeling him bare and hard against her bum.

Rose feels herself tensing up again, as she wonders if he plans to take her this way; knows men like it like that but worries, feeling it too unintimate for their first time together.

But just as she’s about to vocalise that fear, he flips her onto her back and slides down to kneel at the foot of the bed.

Drawing her legs up one at a time, to rest against his stomach, he begins a slow, deep massage of her feet and ankles and calf muscles. The motion draws her eye to his nude erection, feeling brave enough to look on purpose for the first time.

It’s standing very proudly there, long and thick and impossibly hard. And flushed redder than she’d expect, and she wonders if that’s another anatomical different, an effect of his binary vascular system. Perhaps he’s got more blood pumping through it, or something, and she can practically feel his voice in her head beginning to lecture her about physiological differences and anatomical superiority, Rose, and Time Lord stamina.

But that’s about all that looks different. Apart from that, it looks completely normal, just bobbing there tantalisingly back and forth as he massages her limbs, brushing accidently against her skin from time to time and leaving a small smear of liquid. But then again, his shoulder _looked_ normal, didn’t it? She eyes his cock suspiciously. He watches her watching him, eyes smouldering; and that’s when she realises.

He’s displaying himself to her, the bloody peacock.

“You show-off!”

“Bit too cocky?” he quirks an eyebrow.

“Oh, you’re _bad_ ,” she groans, kicking him playfully in the abdomen with her foot.

“Sorry,” he chuckles back, stilling her foot, and Rose suspects that for once he isn’t even remotely sorry, cause now he’s actually bending her leg so it’s just the right height for him to start kissing a line up from her ankle.

She sighs in delight, letting her head fall back further into the pillows. 

Lips trail higher and higher until she gasps when she realises what he’s intending to do.

“Okay?” the Doctor looks up from between her legs, wetting his lips.

Rose bites down hard and nods, and before she’s knows it, he’s buried his face in her pussy, licking and kissing and sucking until her eyes cross and her hips thrust feebly out and her hands fist in those thick, gorgeous, chocolatey locks she so adores.

Muffled moaning reaches her ears, and she can hear herself moaning, too, and see his slender, pale hips rubbing against the mattress, and it’s so much and not enough and she wants to beg him, beg him, beg him to make it stop.

And then she’s exploding into a million little pieces beneath his steady grip.

“That was amazing,” she pants, coming down. “Wow, and you, too...”

The Doctor looks up at her with a grin, mouth shiny and wet. And in that moment, she doesn’t know why she was so embarrassed earlier, because he’s obviously enjoyed it so much that he’s come messily against the bedsheet.

“Not to worry,” he says, moping it up with a spare towel before crawling further up the bed to lay beside her. “Plenty more where that came from.”

“No, really,” she rambles, delirious, and ecstatic and dangerously honest. “I didn’t know it could be like that. No one’s ever… well, you know.”

“What? Kissed you between the legs?” he asks quietly, chin in his hands, as he closely watches the play of her expression and uses that clever mind of his to divine. “Or made you come?”

“Either,” she laughs. “Both. And now, twice. Wow.”

But he’s only looking back darkly. 

“What?” she rushes to explain. “That’s not so strange… I’m only twenty, lots of my mates haven’t-“

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he cuts her off.

“What?”

“I said I shouldn’t be doing this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you liked the latest chapter!
> 
> Please comment and review if you are enjoying this story. Let me know what do you think of the Doctor and Rose's character development and their relationship so far, and where you are hoping it will go!


	16. His

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he cuts her off.
> 
> “What?”
> 
> “I said I shouldn’t be doing this.”

Rose winces.

“Don’t do this,” she pleads to the Doctor.

“I’m sorry,” he shrugs helplessly, unable to meet her eyes.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says compassionately. “Just tell me what you’re feeling.”

But he just shakes his head wordlessly and looks very, very guilty.

Embarrassed, Rose pulls the sheets back over her naked body and tries not to burst into tears.

“Don’t cry,” he asks plaintively.

“Look, I’ll cry if I want to,” she snaps sharply, before her voice betrays her by wobbling. “You _just_ said it didn’t matter that I’m not as experienced as you.”

“It’s not that,” he whispers back, and to Rose it reads as insincere.

“You called me a whore, the other day, with Toby.”

“No, I didn’t,” he protests. 

But she barrels on anyway, unable to stop the ugly words as they spill out.

“You did. You’re only doing this because you’re bored or you’re lonely and you thought it wouldn’t matter to me cause I’m just some chav off a council estate whose been with loads of men-“

“I _don’t_ think that and even if you had, it wouldn’t _mean_ that-”

“Liar,” she croaks.

“I’m trying to do right by you, can’t you see that?”

“Just stop with your clever words and your stories and admit you don’t think I’m good enough for you.”

“How could you think that?” he breathes.

“Then why?” she asks, bereft; letting him see the tears slip from her eyes.

“Please don’t cry,” he begs. “You think I think you’re not good enough for me. _I’ve_ made you think you’re not good enough for me. But it’s just the opposite. Can’t you see?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“How can I explain it to you?” he tries again, running a hand through his hair in distress. “And that’s part of the problem, that you have no reference point for this, this… _this_ , between us.”

“I’m not stupid,” she cries, wiping at her eyes. 

“No. But you’re so young. There’s so much of life you haven’t lived yet. That you’ve only lived through my eyes.”

“So?” she snivels pathetically.

“You’re so young. But _I’ve_ lived so long. I’m _so old_ now, Rose,” sad brown eyes plead. “You think I’m Daphnius. And I understand why, because I’ve been encouraging it. But I’m not. I’m more like Pan. I’m ancient, and forever, and here to shepherd you on to the man you’re meant to give this to. Not to steal it for myself.”

“Well, that’s bollocks.”

“What?” he splutters, caught off guard.

“That’s bollocks. You _do_ know you aren’t _actually_ a god, yeah?”

He pouts at her, more than a little put out.

“You once told me you were the Time Lord equivalent of all of thirty-four.”

“That’s-that’s-that’s,” he attempts to spit out an explanation, but she cuts him off with a raised hand.

“Shut up. I know that was just you talking rubbish to me. You’re not thirty-four, okay. But you’re also not a god, or a lonely angel. You’re a person, same as the rest of us. That’s what she said to me, you know, that you were a ‘lonely angel,’ and I remember thinking- what bollocks.”

“Who?” the Doctor asks, genuinely confused.

“Reinette,” Rose continues matter-of-factly, proud of herself for not stumbling on the name. “She thought she knew you, but she didn’t- I do. And I bet she took it straight from your silly self-sacrificing head, too.”

The Doctor’s eyes practically bulge out of his head.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she acknowledges. “I know about _that_ little game you played with her, too. There were mirrors everywhere on that ship. She might have been charming, and _accomplished_ , and clever, but she didn’t know you well enough to know that how you think about yourself isn’t always reality, did she?”

“I didn’t realise you’d seen so much,” he blushes.

“I see a lot of things. I know you’ve been hurt, badly,” she says, cupping his face. “It makes sense that you… think these things about yourself sometimes, it really does. But I do see you, and I know you’re just as deserving of… a-affection as the rest of us mortals, remember?”

“Yeah,” he croaks.

“Also remember how we agreed I have a say on who I ‘give’ this too?”

“Oh, Rose,” he breathes. “Am I an idiot?”

“Yes,” she agrees, before adding more tenderly, “And no. You’re a man whose been hurt more than anyone deserves to be hurt. But you’re also the man who saw that I was nervous just then, and slowed things down, and knew how to make me feel better. I’m so glad to have you in my life. And I want to be with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Are you _really_ sure?” he asks, as vulnerable as she’s ever heard him.

“I’m sure,” she says, brushing the fringe out of his eyes as he leans into her hand like a puppy. “Come here, Doctor.”

“Forgive me,” he sighs, as he slips under the sheet and braces himself on top of her. 

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she whispers up at him, move her hand down to stroke the stubble on his cheeks.

“I mean, forgive me for doing this.”

“I know,” she says sadly.

He takes his wilting cock in hand, awkwardly stroking himself back to full flag. The sheets slip down his back little by little, revealing once more his body to her and her body to him. Hungry eyes fall to her breasts, and then to the patch of dark hair between her legs.

“Not too late to back out,” his eyes quirk as he notices her watching him masturbate himself. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Not even remotely what I was thinking,” she smirks. “But I do appreciate that, really. And you know you don’t have to either, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“But if you do want to…?”

“Yeah,” he gives her a short, sharp nod, and places himself at her entrance.

“May I?” he asks again.

“Come into me, my Doctor,” she implores, holding him in her gaze. “Make me yours.”

A funny little sound echoes from the back of his throat, and he presses forward.

“Oh,” she sighs as he slowly pushes her open, one hand shooting up to his shoulder. “Hold on a sec, let me adjust.”

He stills obediently inside her at the command, so obediently that she rather expects another ‘Yes Ma’am,’ as her body tenses, and spasms, unused to being stretched that way for quite some time and never by one so hard and thick. 

“Breathe, Rose. Just relax.” he soothes tenderly, stroking her flanks up and down, and she feels herself let go of some of the tension with a ragged exhale. “That’s it, there you are. In and out. In and out.”

“Isn’t that your part?” she huffs on a little strained chuckle.

“Oi,” he taps playfully on her thigh. “Cheeky mare.”

“Mare…?” Rose raises a black eyebrow.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, well- when I say that, what I mean, is…”

“Hey,” she beams up at him, so he knows she’s just kidding. “If the term fits.”

“You’re teasing me.”

“Mmm, no,” she leans up seductively to wrap her arms around him, nipping at his pouty bottom lip. “Just wondering when you were gonna start taking me for a ride.”

Mouth slackening in unexpected arousal, the Doctor thrusts up sharply with a cry, pushing her hips into the mattress and his cock deeper into her body.

“Woah,” Rose squeals, half with shock, half with laughter. “Steady on cowboy!”

“Oh, that’s _it_ ,” he mutters, shaking his head.

Clever hands shoot out to tickle at her sides, and Rose giggles joyously, irrepressibly, squirming to and fro beneath his touch. The Doctor, embedded deep inside her still, groans woefully as she flinches at just the right angle, before chuckling filthily as she sticks her tongue out at him, and then chasing it with his mouth.

The motion tilts his pelvis forward again and this time they both groan, before breaking out into jubilant laughter together.

Laughter in bed; for the Doctor and Rose, it’s both a revelation of how sex can be and a confirmation of how they secretly thought it would be between them if they ever came together. They’ve always worked well as a team, after all. Why shouldn’t that carry over into bed?

“There you are. That’s better,” she smiles up at him. “Happier?”

“Happy,” his eyes crinkle down at her, and Rose can tell he means it.

Their hips move awkwardly together at first, trying to find a pace that they both like.

“How’s that?” he asks.

“Mmm, s’lovely,” she sighs, wrapping an arm loosely around his neck. 

“How about this?” he asks again as he tries a heavier buck; watching her response close and intent and heavy-lidded.

“Oh... yes, that’s it,” she hisses, back arching off the bed. “Fuck me like that.”

“Oh yeah,” he moans in agreement, picking up his pace until she’s just barely holding on while he pummels into her, the pair of them panting together upon impact. “Always knew you’d have a mouth on you.”

“Knew?” Rose finally musters up the breath to respond.

“Well,” he drawls. “Hoped?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he grins down at her, besotted.

She grins back up at him, every bit as besotted and unable to hide it.

The Doctor’s face softens into something even more tender, and he slows his hips again to direct them towards a gentler dance.

It becomes a pace she can manage to keep up with, now; deep, and long, and steady, and serious. They trade probing, affectionate looks; eyes drilling into eyes between warm, open mouthed kisses. His pelvis hits hers with a little twist on each upstroke that’s just gorgeous.

She longs to take him deeper; wraps her legs desperately around his hips, touches him everywhere she can reach… his bum, his back, his arms, his ears. Counts every freckle on his beautiful face; every light brown eyelash as they brush against his cheeks… reaches up to stroke her tongue over his thin upper lip, suck the pouty bottom lip into her mouth, making him cry against her… mutters sweet nothings into his chin, and hears him mutter back the same. How beautiful she is, how good she feels wrapped around him, how much he appreciates her eyes and her lips and her tits and her cunt and her arse.

Before she knows it, she’s breaking apart in his arms again and there’s love in her heart and with her last remaining bit of sanity she forces herself not to actually _say it_ to him.

When she recovers, he’s blinking down at her, patient and expectant. 

He asks if she’d like another.

“Yeah,” she nods eagerly, surprised. “I mean… can I?”

“Oh, I think you can,” he smiles softly, rolling her over onto her front to take her from behind. 

A pillow is placed beneath her hips, and a hand moves between her legs to open up her lips, and he thrusts back in. It’s faster, this time, his hands guiding her waist and his balls slapping against her arse and an enthusiastic grunt sounding out from deep within his chest at each thrust, and Rose is enjoying it so much that she barely has it in her to worry about what she looks like to him. Something wild, and obscene, and a bit stupid, probably.

On her third of the night, she clamps down on him so hard that he cries out and starts to lose his own rhythm, half-collapsing on top of her sweaty back to sloppily hump into her.

“I’m supposed to ask…” he mutters from behind her between thrusts. “I know I’m supposed to ask.”

“What is it?” she turns to look at him over her shoulder.

“Rose, I want to ejaculate inside you,” he pleads desperately, hair askew, eyes wild. “Is that alright?”

“Yeah… cause… you can’t get me pregnant, right? Different species.”

“Oh. No. Ummm. I could give you a child.”

“Oh, then… better not, yeah?”

“We could just leave it to fate,” he asks, heartbreakingly hopefully. “What d’you think?”

“You don’t- you don’t believe in fate.”

“Spose.”

Rose turns her head back into the pillow.

“You should… I mean, you’re not thinking properly. You should think this through, when you aren’t about to come.”

“Quite right too,” he mutters distantly from behind her, chasing after his orgasm with a few more thrusts before pulling out with an abrupt squelch. 

Rose cranes her neck around again, intending to watch him finish, but as soon as he notices, a gentle pressure is being placed on her shoulder and she quickly gets the message that this is not welcome.

Face down in white, fluffy cotton, she lies there listening to the glide of his hand against his erection. Heavy breathing becomes ragged, and a choked, pained cry echoes through the room as the force of his orgasm splashes across her bottom in rope after pearly rope.

She’s still afterwards, feeling exposed and embarrassed while he reaches for the towel and delicately wipes her up as if she is a precious object in some stuffy old country manor in need of a careful polishing.

Then he’s turning off the light and lying down next to her.

Thankfully, he pulls her into his chest again after that. But it’s with a heavy, mournful sigh.

“Sorry,” he murmurs into her crown. “Got a bit carried away there.”

She swallows as he starts stroking her back soothingly (soothing him? her?), only half-wanting to ask the question she knows she must ask.

“What happened just then, at the end?”

The Doctor is silent for a moment.

But the large hands stroking her do not stop.

“It’s just… sex and reproduction- it’s all a bit more wrapped up together, in my culture,” he finally verbalises. “And I forget it’s not, for yours, sometimes.”

“But… you said in school- you were with a man.”

More silence.

“I thought that wasn’t a problem for you,” his next response comes icily.

“It’s not! I’m just trying to understand.”

“And like I said, I wasn’t meant to, just like I’m not meant to with- and besides, he was very much already damaged, and I didn’t know any better, never having… What I – what he- well.”

“But Reinette? Do you mean…she… you…?”

The Doctor freezes even further, if possible.

“What about the timelines?” Rose cries plaintively, taking it for an affirmation. “How could you risk getting her pregnant?”

“I’ve told you, over and over again…” he mutters.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, s’just, I didn’t realise. I mean, are you telling me this meant something more… serious to you?” she stammers, scarcely daring to hope.

But the Doctor doesn’t respond; just inhales sharply before kissing the top of her head and squeezing her body desperately tight.

It’s a kind of answer, Rose supposes, willing herself to drift off to what becomes an uneasy sleep.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s world is crashing down around him.

He asked her if she was _sure_ , he thinks to himself, and she said that she was and she asked him to make her _his._ But then, for her to ask that… obviously it didn’t mean what he thought it did to her, if she could ask _that_ , afterwards.

_Make me yours_ was just a bit of dirty talk. _I’m sure_ was surety of sharing her body, not her heart. This whole thing between them, this thing that he couldn’t put into words, didn’t dare put into words (and wasn’t that ironic, because if he did, then maybe she could have warned him), didn’t mean anything to her other than comfort, experimentation, pleasure… another new experience he was meant to show her, perhaps.

He holds her tighter still, trying not to cry.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t her fault. It was his.

He knew that in her society, sex wasn’t always thought of that way, and he took her anyway. Took his merry time about it, too, performing none of the rituals that would signify himself as a potential life mate in her culture, and tried to withdraw halfway through the act, making her question her worth, making her cry.

Damn near cried himself when she left him out in the cold to come, and now is lying here, cloaked in her, trying desperately to hold his snivelling at bay again. No wonder she doesn’t see him as a serious prospect.

Well, the Doctor resolves, he’ll just have to woo her, then. Like any human man would.

After those feel blissful moments of intimacy, he’s not prepared to give them up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave your comments and reviews if you are enjoying this story, I love to hear your thoughts and ideas on the Doctor and Rose!


	17. Wooing, broken hulls, and lionesses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knew that in her society, sex wasn’t always thought of that way, and he took her anyway. Took his merry time about it, too, performing none of the rituals that would signify himself as a potential life mate in her culture, and tried to withdraw halfway through the act, making her question her worth, making her cry.
> 
> Damn near cried himself when she left him out in the cold to come, and now is lying here, cloaked in her, trying desperately to hold his snivelling at bay again. No wonder she doesn’t see him as a serious prospect.
> 
> Well, the Doctor resolves, he’ll just have to woo her, then. Like any human man would.
> 
> After those feel blissful moments of intimacy, he’s not prepared to give them up.

A few more blissful, unsure days on Sanctuary Base Six after that are spent learning how their bodies work together, in between the usual jobs in the laundry and the cafeteria and on the drill. The Doctor puts his mind towards trying to woo Rose in as many ways possible. In bed, he seems to be able to figure it out so far as he can tell; they’ve always worked well together physically, and he’s (mainly) certain from her physiological and verbal reactions she’s enjoying it. 

But outside of bed things are proving more difficult. 

Wooing Rose is a puzzle the Doctor can’t quite work out. There are no presents to gift her here (though somehow she’d managed to find a present for him, in presenting his mended suit); no magnificent, romantic places he can take her on a date. 

And that’s pretty much always been the Doctor’s only move. 

But at least the prospect of impressing Rose through placing travel across the entirety of time and space at her feet is moving a little bit closer, because finally, finally he manages to get the drill energy boost working. 

She’s so happy, and calls him her brilliant man again, and he preens, so proud of her praise. Wants to bask in it forever, and feels stupid and pathetic and needy but also pleased, and content, and warm. 

And cared for. 

And that leads to a second breakthrough: a date idea for Rose. 

If he can’t be romantic, perhaps he can show her he cares for her contribution to the TARDIS recovery effort, too. After all, he’s well aware of how hard she’s been working to cover his shifts, and if she didn’t do that then they wouldn’t get their assigned work done, and on a base like this, not getting your assigned work done is not a good way to try and get along. To put it lightly. 

The Doctor quickly gets acting on his plan. Finagles a night off for her; explains it to Danny while she’s working in the laundry, manages to trade in a favour. Dresses up their cabin as much as he can, and gets cooking in the kitchen. 

While running around organising all this, the Doctor comes across Scooti on her knees with her hands full of wires repairing some equipment in one of the hallways. 

Remembering another promise, he sidles up to Scooti with his hands in his pockets, intending to ask her about what’s been happening with Toby, and offering to help. But as soon as he opens his mouth, Rose’s words about him collecting women and having a way with them and hopping beds and finding shiny new toys to play with echo back at him, and everything comes out all-awkward tongued. 

Scooti looks at him as if he’s a complete creep, and scurries off down the hallway, dropping her wires carelessly to the ground. 

Meanwhile, Rose is finishing up her work in the laundry room. She’s feeling tired, and sore, and nervous, and jittery, and overwhelmingly desperate to lock eyes with the Doctor again. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to serve him dinner now. If she’s really lucky, he’ll duck behind the counter and eat with her while she’s working. As happy as the changes between them over the last few days have made her, she still remembers why she hates being a dinner lady. 

As she’s walking stiffly towards the cafeteria, imaging such a night, Scooti practically runs past her, jolting her shoulder. 

Rose calls out to ask her what’s wrong, but she only gives her an angry little glower, and doesn’t stop running. 

It’s rather unsettling, but soon forgotten as she enters the kitchen to find Danny standing there dolling out the bases dinner into the troughs. 

“What’s all this?” she blinks. 

But Danny only smiles enigmatically at her, and explains she’s needed back in her cabin to help the Doctor with something, and not to worry about her cafeteria shift tonight.

Confused, she does as bid. 

Rose walks into their cabin and bursts into tears.

The Doctor’s cooked dinner for them both, and set it up as a date in their room. 

“Don’t cry,” he moves to stand, leading her towards the desk with a gentle arm wrapped around her back. “My cooking’s not that bad, is it?”

“Thank you,” she sobs, turning it into a hug. 

“Oh, Rose,” he replies, returning it heartily. “I should have been available to help you more.” 

“Don’t be silly. You’re finding the TARDIS.” 

“But you must be exhausted. You’ve been working every day since we got here, and it’s been over five weeks.” 

“So have you! And I want to help. In whatever small way I can. I can’t just do nothing.” 

“Nothing about you is small, Rose Tyler,” he grins, affectionately tucking her hair behind her ear.

They eat together slowly, trading conversation about nothing and holding hands. It really feels like a real date. A night off from being a dinner lady. A treat. 

There’s only the desk chair, and although the Doctor starts their meal sitting on the crate she’d nicked all those weeks ago for him to rest his feet on before he worked up the courage to sleep in her bed, at some point he ends up with Rose on his lap feeding him spoonsful of Protein Eight (the one that tastes like banana pudding). 

This eventually leads to them making love in the chair, fulfilling a fantasy for them both, before moving it to their bed and then, very late in the night, sneaking into the shower together (another fantasy). 

He doesn’t ask to come inside her, again, or mention anything about a child. Just pulls out perfunctorily after he’s brought her to each staggering climax, and strokes himself towards the same, or lets her stroke him, or suck him off. Later that night, after their third time, they hold each other in bed with a particular intensity. 

The next day, it all turns to chaos.

Rose is working in the laundry room alone when the alarm sounds for an emergency hull breach. 

The whole base starts to shake, and she tries to make her way to the cupboard to shelter like she and the Doctor did the last time this happen. But just as she steps over the threshold, something heavy comes tumbling down from above, and she’s out cold. 

Her last remaining thought as she stares at the bottles of cleaning chemicals thrown around her prone body is that she really wishes she hadn’t left that big box on the top shelf. 

The Doctor is with Danny in the Ood cage when the emergency hull breach sounds. He’d traded Rose’s shift with the man in question last night in exchange for helping figure out a tricky problem with the Ood. They’ve been saying, well, odd things and becoming non-responsive for short periods of time. 

Danny reckons it’s probably due to interference with the telepathic field the Ood use to communicate, as there’s so many stray signals from the planets and asteroids and assorted miscellanea breaking apart in the black hole above them. But he says he’s known the Doctor long enough now to value the second opinion of an obvious polymath. 

The Doctor would have been chuffed to help Danny with the problem even if he hadn’t been an essential component in Operation Woo Rose’s first great success. It’s an interesting problem. But he doesn’t tell Danny that, of course. 

Only before he can properly investigate, the alarm is sounding and he and Danny have no choice but to attempt to shelter in place. Though he hates the thought of Rose sheltering alone, her delicate head unprotected, he also knows she’s sensible and is working in the laundry and will remember to get herself into the cupboard. 

That’s before the call comes through from Zach to evacuate that part of the base. The Doctor leaps up like a madman to run to her, unwilling to risk the message not reaching her (was there a speaker in the cupboard, after all?) or her having an accident while she does evacuate (the whole base is still shaking and shuddering heavily, and she may be able to look after herself but he’s had hundreds of years of experience of trouble to call upon). 

When he reaches her, his hearts momentarily stop.

She’s sprawled out pale and unmoving on the floor between the cupboard and the laundry, golden hair fanned out like a halo. 

“Rose!” he falls to his feet beside her, quickly inspecting her for spinal injuries quickly before gently shaking her by the shoulders. “Wake up!” 

There’s a bump on her forehead and her eye is black and there’s blood pouring down her lip, but her chest is moving and there doesn’t seem to be any damage to her spine. 

“Please wake up,” he pleads. 

Thankfully, she begins to come to at his touch or his words, he doesn’t know which. 

“Are you alright?” he begs. 

“My head… something fell,” she mumbles, woozy but coherent, and sure enough there’s a turned over basket and cleaning bottles splattered across the floor around her. 

“Can you walk?” he asks, helping her sit up. “We need to evacuate, immediately.”

“Yeah,” she says faintly, struggling to her feet with his assistance. 

But she falters against him, and he ends up having to catch her and sweep her into a bridal carry to get them out of the room. 

In a preternatural display of strength, he carries her like that down what feels like hallway after shuddering hallway, sheltering her body with his as much as he can. 

They make it to safety in Habitat 3. 

The rest of the missing crew bar Scooti comes barrelling in one by one, but the Doctor barely notices because he’s preoccupied with propping Rose up against the wall and inspecting her properly for injury. 

The sonic screwdriver is shined into her pupils, and he checks that the bleeding from her lip is actually coming from her lip and not from her mouth, which might indicate an internal hematoma. He barks out what must sound like rude questions about blurred vision, or nausea, or light-headedness, and ask her to move each and every one of her limbs and sound out Raxacoricofallapatorius. 

“How about something I could usually pronounce?” she laughs, and relief flows through him as he starts to accept she’s probably not more seriously injured. 

“Thank god you’re alright,” he says, not even bothering to correct that she can very well say Raxacorciofallapatorius, and has been able to for quite some time, thank you very much. 

“My Dr Doctor,” she sighs, then looks behind him. “Always taking care of me. Where’s Scooti?” 

“Right. Where’s Scooti.” 

He spins around to join the others in their growing concern for the young crew member. 

Perhaps she’d been injured like Rose, and hadn’t had anyone to go after her. 

Panic mounts; someone thinks to check her communicator but it just returns a confusing message stating she’s right there in the room with them. 

From that little bit of information, the Doctor is able to come to an unhappy conclusion. 

He flips on the switch to open the roof, revealing Scooti above them, dead and floating. 

There’s only one way she would have got there without a spacesuit on. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says to her.

“Oh my god,” utters Rose. 

“She was only twenty,” breathes Ida beside him, obviously devastated by the loss. 

The same age as his Rose; the Doctor can’t help but look guiltily towards her. “I was too distracted.” 

She flinches, but he cannot move to comfort her. 

Instead he turns all his ire on the culprit. 

“You did this,” the Doctor growls at Toby, placing his body between the boy and Rose. 

“Me?” Toby gapes. 

“Yes, you.” 

“Doctor,” warns Jefferson. “Now’s not the time succumb to paranoia.” 

“Oh, I don’t think it’s paranoia,” Toby contends. “I think maybe he’s got something to hide.” 

“Toby,” chides Jefferson. 

Behind him, the Doctor can hear Rose stumbling to her feet. 

“No, really. We don’t even know who he is, he just landed here out of nowhere and now he’s pointing fingers at me to distract you all from the real killer!” 

“You bloody liar,” Rose exclaims, stepping out in front of the Doctor like a lioness. “I know it was you, Toby!”

He pulls her back slightly so they’re standing side by side, and grabs her hand to lend her still-shaky frame the support of his presence. 

“Oh, you would defend him, Rose,” Toby sneers. “You’re so lovesick it’s pathetic.” 

She blushes intently and shoots the Doctor a nervous glance, which he has to try hard not to return. 

“The sad thing is, he doesn’t even care for you enough not to mess about with other women in front of you,” Toby continues, smirking at her look of disgust. “I know you know, Rose. She told me. We were friends.”

“No.”

“He tried it on with her, and she told you, and you blamed her for it!” 

“That’s not true, he would never do that!” she exclaims. 

“Actually, Rose,” says Ida. “You’ve said to me before that he does.”

“Ida,” Rose whips around to look at the woman she thought was her ally, incredulous. “Come on, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Do I?” Ida raises her brows. 

“I know you’re upset about Scooti-“ 

“Yes, I am,” Ida replies sharply. 

“He never- it’s never not consensual,” Rose spits out, pained at having to say the humiliating words aloud for all the room to hear. “He flirts, yeah- he’s a right charming git, but only when they flirt back. Believe me, I know, cause I’ve had to watch. But the Doctor’s not the kind of man who’d harm anyone, whereas Toby’s been saying horrible things to me, anytime he’s got me alone, and I saw him do the same to Scooti.” 

“Why didn’t you tell anyone, if that was true?” probes Zach. 

“I told the Doctor,” Rose stutters, aware of how thin it sounds. 

“And now you’re falsifying things on his behalf,” Toby says patronisingly. “Look, I know you’re really young and you’re not that bright, and I do feel sorry for you, Rose, cause we can all see he’s taking advantage of you, but you can’t lie for him about something so serious.” 

She loses her temper. “Shut up, he’s not doing that and I’m not lying!” 

“Are you even really married? Cause I think you and I both know you’re not the kind of girl anyone would need to marry.”

“That’s enough,” the Doctor says darkly. 

“But you did lie about being married to her,” Ida announces to the room. “You did.”

“What?” asks Zach, shock echoing clear. 

“Rose told me a while ago they’re only pretending to be married,” Ida confirms. 

“So we could share a cabin, so we could keep each other safe!” exclaims Rose. 

“Ida, how could you not tell me that?” asks Zach. 

“I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was,” Ida stumbles. 

“She’s bruised and bleeding,” Toby continues to twist the knife into them all. “What did he, have an argument with her and decide to take it out on Scooti?”

“I would never brutalise Rose,” states the Doctor. 

“I saw what you did to her arm the other day. You know, when you pinned me to the wall and said you’d kill me if I ever spoke to your woman.”

“That’s not true!” Rose cries. 

“Is it?” Toby beseeches, and she’s disgusted by the guileless, condescending look he manages to summon. “Can you honestly stand there and say that he didn’t cause that bruise? Or tell me he’d kill me?”

“You’re twisting it, just like you’re twisting everything, twisting everyone around here!” 

“I think that’s confirmation enough. Do you even know his name?” 

“Stop it, stop lying!” 

“What’s his name, Rose?”

“It’s the Doctor.”

“That is not a name.” 

“That’s the name he chose, so it’s his name, okay?”

“I’ve claimed Rose as my wife in all but ceremony,” the Doctor says firmly. “We’ve promised each other our forevers, and lain together as man and woman. That’s the most part of it, for my people. And I would do more than that, if she’d have me.” 

“Really?” she turns to look at him, wide-eyed and wondrous. 

The Doctor nods shyly at her, before continuing to address the room. “And I’ve never betrayed her, before or after we lay together, consensually or otherwise. Despite what she may think. Despite what I may have led her to believe, because I was a coward, afraid of letting her too close.” 

He’s looking at them, but his words are meant for her. 

“And I hope someday she’ll believe that. And forgive me.” 

“I do,” Rose says quietly, assuredly. 

“Oh, Rose,” breathes the Doctor. “Truly?” 

“You know Doctor,” Toby drawls threateningly. “All this talk of you being ‘different.’ It’s almost as if you’re something else than human.” 

Suddenly, a great grinding noise behind them goes quiet.

“Oh my god, it’s the drill, it’s stopped,” someone says. 

“We did it,” someone else says, just as shell-shocked. 

“What are we gonna do about him?” asks another.

“Hold on though,” says Danny. “Cause the Doctor was with me in the Ood cage, when the alarm sounded. He only ran that way to get Rose, after you told us to evacuate, ‘cause she was in the laundry.” 

“So what?” mutters Toby quickly. 

“So the doors would lock down automatically in the breached room, soon as the hull was damaged- so Scooti would have had to have already been in the room where it happened, when the hull broke. So the timeline doesn’t add up.” 

“You don’t know that,” Toby scoffs. 

“But there is a way of knowing,” says Jefferson knowledgably. “Cause we may only have video in the main rooms, but we’ve got the trackers everywhere.” 

“The trackers. Brilliant!” the Doctor exclaims goofily. “Why didn’t I think of that?” 

“Alright, that’s enough discussion for today,” says Zach authoritatively. “Doctor, Toby, to your cabins. Ida and I will review the data and we’ll reconvene in the morning. I’m sure neither of you did this. Till we can prove that, you’re both on lockdown.” 

“Very well,” nods the Doctor. 

“That’s protocol,” agrees Toby unenthusiastically. 

“We’ll sort this out, and then head down there- the mission goes on,” says Zach. 

Hand still linked in hand, the Doctor and Rose turn to leave the room together. 

“Actually, Rose,” Zach stops her reluctantly. “I think you’d better stay in a separate cabin to the Doctor, given the allegations that have just been made.” 

“Not a chance,” Rose says with certainty. “The Doctor’d never hurt me. Him and me, we stay together, no matter what.”

The Doctor raises his chin, shamefaced and guilty and defiant. 

“Very well,” Zach nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think of these developments between the Doctor and Rose, and the Doctor, Rose and the crew? 
> 
> Please leave your thoughts, comments and reviews :) I live for your theories on their relationship!


End file.
